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March 7, 2016 - Adar I 27, 5776

NEWS

Biella Celebrates the Return
of Ancient Sefer Torah

By Ada Treves

"An extraordinary Shabbat that will remain in the history of the Jewish Community of Biella, certainly, but also in the Italian Jewish history." With these words Dario Disegni, president of the Italian Jewish Cultural Heritage Foundation has answered to Rabbi Elia Richetti, that at the end of the ceremony that saw the oldest kosher Sefer Torah in the world return to the synagogue where it belongs, commented "It was a truly extraordinary Shabbat, I am really sorry for those who were not here with us".
The sofer Amedeo Spagnoletto was clearly proud telling the story of what he calls "our Sefer Torah."

CULTURE

Umberto Eco, Leaving the Rhetoric aside

By Guido Vitale*

“A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own”. It is inevitable to think of Thomas Mann’s words when looking at the rhetorical orgy that marked Italy’s final farewell to Umberto Eco. From the tributes that flooded every square to the rivers of ink that have been spent to write about it, the last respects paid to the great intellectual are this year’s real jubilee. However, what would it be his own opinion about it? Wouldn’t he have preferred more meaningful pages and less empty words? A greater sobriety? Less hasty, more articulate judgments which may correspond better to his complexity and, why not, to his dark sides? When we met at his immense Foro Buonaparte house-library, near Sforza Castle in Milan, he seemed to me to be really enjoying himself looking at Enea Riboldi’s striking cartoon in Pagine Ebraiche. He was depicted as a more or less careful sorcerer’s apprentice ready to prepare poisons of all kinds. From his cauldron, the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a great classic of anti-Semitism, were coming out. For sure, they were drawn to condemn their impact, to name and shame their nature, to highlight their grotesque and tragic role.

*This article has been translated in English by Isabella Favero, student at the Scuola superiore interpreti e traduttori di Trieste, ‎who is doing her apprenticeship within the newsroom of Pagine Ebraiche. The artwork is by Enea Riboldi.

culture

Umberto Eco: Surfing in a Sea of Books

By Daniela Gross

When, a couple of weeks ago, a dear friend texted me that Umberto Eco had died, I felt a strange pang of emotion. It always happens, when a teacher of ours leaves us. However, my relation to his teaching has nothing to do with semiotics but rather with his Come si fa una tesi di laurea (How to write a graduate thesis). I loved that book, even though it was not a literary milestone. With his practical suggestions and his plain, accurate, and cultured prose, it was like a sip of fresh oxygen for a student like me, about to collapse amongst flash cards and archives.
Through the years, I found the same accuracy and levity in his countless interviews, essays and books. And it happened again when I went to meet him, along with the editor in chief of Pagine Ebraiche Guido Vitale, for an interview dedicated to his new book, The Prague Cemetery. Meeting someone beloved through his writing may be disappointing, because not always the man and the writer share the same heights. But in this case it did not go that way, because he was even more interesting, funny, and cultured than his books.

media

Five Internships and the 500th Anniversary
of the Ghetto

By Pagine Ebraiche staff*

The year 2016 marks the 500th anniversary of the founding of the Ghetto of Venice. The March issue of Pagine Ebraiche features a special section devoted to the event; edited by journalist Ada Treves. The articles are going to be translated for Pagine Ebraiche International Edition by the students of the Scuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne per Interpreti e Traduttori dell’Università degli Studi di Trieste, the major school for interpreters and translators in Italy. Five of them, Giulia, Ilaria, Giulia, Isabella e Letizia, have chosen to do their internships in the newsroom of Pagine Ebraiche. The following is the introduction to the special section. A press conference presenting the calendar of the events will be held in Rome on March 9th, 2016.

By Pagine Ebraiche staff*

"The delicate condition of the Venetian Jewish community represents a crossroads that has made people come to difficult and uncompromising decisions that, at the same time, were open to the external world”. Pagine Ebraiche opens its dossier dedicated to the 500th anniversary of the founding of the Venice Ghetto with an article written by Rav Roberto della Rocca. In his article he observes that “one of the community’s strong points was its capability of taking out and assimilating the external world without being absorbed by it and adapting its response to the changing world “. Nowadays, those who live in today’s Ghetto and observe it from the windows of the art galleries and shops offer an insight into its narrow streets that often transforms criticism into tender thoughts. The Ghetto is alive, and many leaders have asserted that for the organizations they represent that the Jewish community’s value and its glorious history deserve respect and the attention owed to the demanding present.

*This article was translated into English by Ilaria Modena, student at the Scuola superiore interpreti e traduttori di Trieste, ‎who is doing her apprenticeship in the newsroom of Pagine Ebraiche.

events

Venice: The first Ghetto

By Jerry Brotton*

It is nearly 500 years to the day when, on March 29 1516, the Venetian authorities assigned the site of a polluted, disused "geto", the Italian for foundry, in the north of the city as where Jews would be segregated from the Christian community.
Wooden gates were erected, all exits were locked, and doors and windows walled up. The authorities ordered that the gates "shall be closed at midnight by four Christian guards appointed and paid for by the Jews", and opened in the morning. Those found outside the area were subject to heavy fines and imprisonment. It was the first attempt to systematically segregate a community solely on the grounds of their religion. The decision gave birth to the ghetto, one of the most notorious words in history, a byword for discrimination, persecution, poverty and urban deprivation, forever associated with the horrors of the Nazi atrocities of the 1930s and 1940s.
Today, entering the Campo del Ghetto Nuovo, a square in the city's northern district of Cannaregio, one of the first things a visitor sees are the two bas-relief memorials to the 247 men, women and children who were deported from the ghetto in 1944 and died in the concentration camps in 1944.
When I visited the ghetto last month, I talked about the memorials to Shaul Bassi, director of the Venice Centre for International Jewish Studies, who also teaches literature at the University of Ca' Foscari in Venice. Shaul is one of the organisers of this year's 500th anniversary commemorations of the ghetto's foundation, which will include, among many other events, a performance of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, scheduled to take place later this summer.

*This article was published in the London Jewish Chronicle on March 3, 2016.

BECHOL LASHON - Français Le sage de Benedetto Carucci Viterbi* Le sage, comme le aron qui contenait les tables de l'alliance et qui était d'or à l'extérieur et à l'intérieur, doit être dehors comme il est dedans. Mais le cœur de l'aron était fait en bois d'érable: le sage doit donc être digne d'honneur à l'extérieur - pour l'honneur qui est dû à la Torah qu'il contient - et doit être conscient du potentiel qu'il possède en lui-même. Mais si tout cela ne repose pas sur la modestie et l'humilité, il est susceptible de devenir un miroitement inconsistant. *Benedetto Carucci Viterbi est rabbin. La traduction est de Francesca Matalon. Lire la suite	pilpul - double life Hair Politics By Daniela Fubini There must be something political about hair. Something I cannot completely grasp and therefore lingers in my mind while I watch the news and the social media posts. Photo-shopped caricatures merging Donald John Trump and Silvio Bunga Bunga Berlusconi are already out there, I suppose with big nuisance to Mr. B, who would have loved to have any kind of hair, even the impossible cloud of yellowish emptiness sported by the Trump. *Daniela Fubini (Twitter @d_fubini) lives and writes in Tel Aviv, where she arrived in 2008 from Turin via New York. Read more

IT HAPPENED TOMORROW Not an Easy Place By Guido Vitale "The ghetto is not an easy place; it does not produce a clear-cut message nor does it have the arresting beauty of the rest of Venice". (Shaul Bassi, The Jewish Chronicle). Read more	italics Venice and Biella under the Spotlight By Pagine Ebraiche staff Lately, Jewish Italian history and present have been receiving a lot of attention from international media. The approaching celebrations for the 500th anniversary of the Ghetto of Venice have been widely covered in the most important media outlets all over the world. Last week, a reportage by Bosniac photographer Ziyah Gafic was featured on the CNN website. “There is a seductive, timeless aura to Gafic's photos of the ghetto,” writes Helena Cavendish de Moura. However, in the past few days, another historic Italian Jewish community has been under the spotlight: Biella in Piedmont, where a Torah scroll has been identified as probably the oldest in the world still owned and used by a Jewish community. Read more

moked è il portale dell'ebraismo italiano

This newsletter is published under difficult conditions. The editors of this newsletter are Italian journalists whose native language is Italian. They are willing to offer their energy and their skills to give international readers the opportunity of learning more about the Italian Jewish world, its values, its culture and its traditions.
In spite of all our efforts to avoid this, readers may find an occasional language mistake. We count on your understanding and on your help and advice to correct these mistakes and improve our publication.

Pagine Ebraiche International Edition is published by the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI). UCEI publications encourage an understanding of the Jewish world and the debate within it. The articles and opinions published by Pagine Ebraiche International Edition, unless expressly stated otherwise, cannot be interpreted as the official position of UCEI, but only as the self-expression of the people who sign them, offering their comments to UCEI publications. Readers who are interested in making their own contribution should email us at desk@ucei.it
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© UCEI - All rights reserved - The articles may only be reproduced after obtaining the written permission of the editor-in-chief. Pagine Ebraiche - Reg Rome Court 199/2009 – Editor in Chief: Guido Vitale - Managing Editor: Daniela Gross.
Special thanks to: Francesco Moises Bassano, Susanna Barki, Amanda Benjamin, Monica Bizzio, Angelica Edna Calò Livne, Eliezer Di Martino, Alain Elkann, Dori Fleekop, Daniela Fubini, Benedetta Guetta, Sarah Kaminski, Daniel Leisawitz, Annette Leckart, Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, Yaakov Mascetti, Francesca Matalon, Jonathan Misrachi, Anna Momigliano, Giovanni Montenero, Elèna Mortara, Sabina Muccigrosso, Lisa Palmieri Billig, Jazmine Pignatello, Shirley Piperno, Giandomenico Pozzi, Daniel Reichel, Colby Robbins, Danielle Rockman, Lindsay Shedlin, Michael Sierra, Rachel Silvera, Adam Smulevich, Simone Somekh, Rossella Tercatin, Ada Treves, Lauren Waldman, Sahar Zivan.

Questo notiziario è realizzato in condizioni di particolare difficoltà. I redattori di questo notiziario sono giornalisti italiani di madrelingua italiana. Mettono a disposizione le loro energie e le loro competenze per raccontare in lingua inglese l'ebraismo italiano, i suoi valori, la sua cultura e i suoi valori. Nonostante il nostro impegno il lettore potrebbe trovare errori e imperfezioni nell'utilizzo del linguaggio che faremo del nostro meglio per evitare. Contiamo sulla vostra comprensione e soprattutto sul vostro aiuto e sul vostro consiglio per correggere gli errori e migliorare.

Pagine Ebraiche International Edition è una pubblicazione edita dall'Unione delle Comunità Ebraiche Italiane. L'UCEI sviluppa mezzi di comunicazione che incoraggiano la conoscenza e il confronto delle realtà ebraiche. Gli articoli e i commenti pubblicati, a meno che non sia espressamente indicato il contrario, non possono essere intesi come una presa di posizione ufficiale, ma solo come la autonoma espressione delle persone che li firmano e che si sono rese gratuitamente disponibili. Gli utenti che fossero interessati a offrire un proprio contributo possono rivolgersi all'indirizzo desk@ucei.it

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© UCEI - Tutti i diritti riservati - I testi possono essere riprodotti solo dopo aver ottenuto l'autorizzazione scritta della Direzione. Pagine Ebraiche International Edition - notiziario dell'ebraismo italiano - Reg. Tribunale di Roma 199/2009 - direttore responsabile: Guido Vitale - Coordinamento: Daniela Gross.
Realizzato con il contributo di: Francesco Moises Bassano, Susanna Barki, Amanda Benjamin, Monica Bizzio, Angelica Edna Calò Livne, Eliezer Di Martino, Alain Elkann, Dori Fleekop, Daniela Fubini, Benedetta Guetta, Sarah Kaminski, Daniel Leisawitz, Annette Leckart, Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, Yaakov Mascetti, Francesca Matalon, Jonathan Misrachi, Anna Momigliano, Giovanni Montenero, Elèna Mortara, Sabina Muccigrosso, Lisa Palmieri Billig, Jazmine Pignatello, Shirley Piperno, Giandomenico Pozzi, Daniel Reichel, Colby Robbins, Danielle Rockman, Lindsay Shedlin, Michael Sierra, Rachel Silvera, Adam Smulevich, Simone Somekh, Rossella Tercatin, Ada Treves, Lauren Waldman, Sahar Zivan.