events

Milan Celebrates 150 Years of Its Jewish Community with Culture Festival

By Pagine Ebraiche staff

The culture festival “Jewish in the City" opened in Milan on Sunday. Hundreds of people gathered at the historic site Rotonda della Besana which is a large edifice with a vast portico completed in the first half of the 18th century. They were there to take part in the event, “The Table of the Community.” The event provided the opportunity to taste Jewish cuisine and kosher products, as well as to find out more about Jewish traditions about hospitality and inclusivity and cultural encounters. Among the speakers were the chief rabbi of Milan, Alfonso Arbib, the co-presidents of the Jewish Community, Raffaele Besso and Milo Hasbani, and the president of the Foundation of the Shoah Memorial of Milan, Ferruccio de Bortoli.

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NEWS

Emeritus President of Italy Wins Award
for His Effort to Strengthen Italy-Israel Ties

By Adam Smulevich
 
The former President of the Italian Republic Giorgio Napolitano won the "Premio Exodus", an international award given by the municipality of La Spezia, a city in the Liguria region from where 23,000 Jewish displaced persons managed to leave Italy clandestinely for Mandate Palestine in the period between 1945 and 1948.
The award has been given to Napolitano in consideration of his strong effort to build and improve  the ties between Italy and Israel during his political career. The prize was given out by the mayor Massimo Federici together with the president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities Renzo Gattegna and the Minister of Justice Andrea Orlando. The ceremony took place last Thursday.

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CULTURE

Historic Library in Parma Publishes
Its Ancient Hebrew Manuscripts Online

By Pagine Ebraiche staff

The Biblioteca Palatina, a prominent historic library located in Parma, a city in northern Italy, has published online over 1,600 ancient Hebrew manuscripts. The digitization of the manuscripts was carried out together with the National Library of Israel, with the cooperation of the Italian Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the support of the Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society.
The collection of Hebrew manuscripts at the Biblioteca Palatina is one of the world’s most important and has been digitized in its entirety as part of the project “Ktiv: The International Collection of Digitized Hebrew Manuscripts”.
To present the results at an event held in Parma last week, were Aviad Stollman, Head of Collections of the National Library of Israel, Sabina Magrini, from the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage, Malachi Beit Ariè from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and president of the Foundation for Jewish Cultural Heritage of Italy, Dario Disegni.

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PORTRAITS

Survivor’s Story: Venetian Ghetto’s
Last Witness to Auschwitz

By Hannah Roberts*

Sitting outside her retirement home in the Venetian Ghetto, wrapped in scarves and a coat, Virginia Gattegno shivers in the spring sunlight. More than 70 years after enduring the Polish winter of 1944, the Auschwitz survivor still feels the cold. She explains: “For us Mediterranean people, who hadn’t experienced cold, that was the cruellest thing, worse than the hunger.”
The birdlike 93-year-old is the last witness of the Nazi death camp living in the ghetto today.
When in 1516, the Doge, Leonardo Loredan, enforced segregation of Venetian Jews, on a small island formerly used as a metal foundry (geto in the Venetian dialect), he instituted the world’s first ghetto. Jews were in the main limited to working as pawnbrokers or moneylenders, wearing yellow circles as identification, and were locked inside the island’s gates at night. While appallingly discriminatory, it was, for some, a shelter from even worse persecution elsewhere.
To mark the 500th anniversary, the remaining Jewish community of about 450 have organised a series of commemorations, including the first performance of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in the ghetto’s principal square, the Campo del Ghetto Nuovo, where Gattegno has lived since 2007. The community is raising funds to preserve the quarter’s crumbling tenement houses and five ornate synagogues.

*This article was published in the Financial Times on May 25, 2016. The picture is by Joan Porcel Pascual.

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BECHOL LASHON - Français

Europe

par David Bidussa*

L'Europe, comme beaucoup d'utopies, est devenue un rêve à jeter. Contrairement à celles-là, elle n'a même pas stimulé un film pour réfléchir. De la Shoah aux desaparecidos argentins, des histoires de mafia à celles du terrorisme, au cours des vingt dernières années, les films, la plupart des livres, ont fait la mémoire publique. Grâce à ces films, on a construit une mémoire auto-critique, c'est-à-dire une mémoire fondée sur la comparaison entre la mémoire des valeurs aux-quels nous disons nous inspirer et à auxquels nous déclarons appartenir et celle des actions pratiques. Une mémoire des torts commis envers les autres. Pas celle dont nous pouvons être fiers, mais celle dont on doit avoir honte. Avec l'Europe, par contre, nous avons refusé de commencer ce chemin. Quand il fallait passer à la mémoire auto-critique, nous avons simplement dit: nous n'aimons pas ce jeu. Faisons un autre.


*David Bidussa est un historien. Traduction par Francesca Matalon.




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pilpul

Mahler, Living in a Novel

By Maria Teresa Milano*

At a glance, it may sound like an adventure novel. Family issues, European history and Jewish life: a tale that begins in the alleyways lined with cinnamon colored shops of the hamlets painted by Chagall and enlivened by klezmoyrin’s music, a tale that travels through the countryside to reach the major cities, intoxicated by Gustav Klimt’s colors and the magic of opera houses. Success and achievements, love and passion, but also mourning, suffering and sorrow. At a glance it does sound like an adventure novel, though in reality it’s Gustav Mahler’s biography. Mahler was born in 1860 in Kaliště, a little bohemian village. His father, Bernhard, owner of a distillery, was very strict, impulsive and ambitious. His mother, Maria, was a wellborn Jewish girl who had to accept, due to limb disability, a marriage without love, marked by the birth of 14 children, six of them dead at a young age.

*Maria Teresa Milano is a Hebraist. The article has been translated by Letizia Anelli, student at the Scuola superiore interpreti e traduttori di Trieste, ‎who is doing her apprenticeship in the newsroom of Pagine Ebraiche.

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IT HAPPENED TOMORROW

Number A-24324

By Guido Vitale

"It's not something you talk about willingly. Many of the generation afterwards preferred not to know. But I felt a duty. Because if the survivors did not speak now, there was a risk of forgetting, of saying that it never happened”. (Virginia Gattegno, number A-24324, Jewish retirement home in the Venetian Ghetto - Financial Times, May 25th 2016)










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Altrove/Elsewhere

Lelio Della Torre

By Daniel Leisawitz*

I’d like to congratulate Jacov Di Segni and his family on the occasion of his smikha, which was celebrated on the evening of Lag ba’omer in the Great Synagogue of Rome.  This seems a good occasion to reflect upon some thoughts put down over a century and a half ago by another Italian rabbi, Lelio Della Torre.  Born in the small Piedmontese city of Cuneo in 1805, Della Torre went on to become a poet, commentator, rabbi, and professor at the Rabbinical College of Padua, where he had the honor of presiding over many ordinations of his talmidim.

*Daniel Leisawitz is a professor at Muhlenberg College (Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA). The artwork is by Abraham Cresques a 14th-century Jewish Spanish cartographer.

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