When she visited Italy for the first time with her father back in 1975, Rabbi Barbara Aiello, from the United States, remembers thinking, “I’ll live here one day.” Three decades later she was doing just that. Now 77, Aiello, originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, relocated to Milan in 2004 and two years later moved to Serrastretta, a village in the southern Italian region of Calabria where her father hailed from.

She went on to marry her second cousin, Enrico, as well as establish “the first and only synagogue in Calabria” in the tiny village located in the province of Catanzaro. “It feels magical,” Aiello — who is known as Rabbi Barbara — says of her life in Serrastretta, before adding that she believes that this was always her destiny. “There’s a Yiddish word, beshert… It means ‘meant to be.’”