UCEI and MACCABI Host Commemorative Race with WJC and eJc support

Thousands Join “Run for Mem” in Rome

By Pagine Ebraiche staff

Thousands of people took part in the non-competitive race “Run for Mem” in Rome on Sunday. 
The initiative was organized by the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, together with Maratona di Roma and Maccabi Italia and with the support of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers.
It also received the crucial support of a number of international Jewish organizations, including the World Jewish Congress and the European Jewish Congress.
The non-competitive race aimed at raising awareness on the importance of Holocaust Remembrance. The route included several streets and squares that witnessed pivotal episodes of the history of the Holocaust in the Italian capital.

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news

New Minister of Education and UCEI President Visit Auschwitz with Italian Students

By Ada Treves

Emotionally and physically exhausting, the two-day trip organized by the Italian Ministry of Education (MIUR) together with the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI) has been a very intense and formative experience for all participants. Minister Valeria Fedeli and UCEI President Noemi Di Segni left Rome together with a hundred students coming from various high schools from all over the country, to travel towards Krakow for a guided visit to the Jewish Ghetto, before the trip to the Death Camp.
The visit to the Jewish ghetto - established by the Nazis - was concluded with the signature of an agreement that is a confirmation and a renewal of the existing cooperation on the issues of Memory and Holocaust Remembrance.

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NEWS

Union of Italian Jewish Communities Salutes Italian President of the European Parliament

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NEWS

Milan Archbishop Visits the Synagogue

By Daniel Reichel
 
The Archbishop of Milan Angelo Scola visited the Central Synagogue of Milan for the first time last week.
The need for a dialogue between religions that can really guarantee social harmony and represent a bulwark against radicalism, intolerance and anti-Semitism, also when it has the face of anti-Zionism, was among the main issues discussed for the occasion.

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bECHOL LASHON - Deutsch

Zehn Kilometer Gedenken

von Andrea Jarach*

Der 27. Januar ist in Italien seit 16 Jahren als »Giorno della Memoria« etabliert, um der Opfer der Schoa zu gedenken. Aus diesem Anlass gibt es am Sonntag erstmals einen Gedenklauf durch Rom. Der »Corsa per la Memoria« oder auch »Run for Mem« soll ausdrücklich keinen Wettbewerbscharakter haben.
Organisiert wird der Lauf von Maccabi Italia und Maratona di Roma. Er steht unter der Schirmherrschaft des Ministerratspräsidiums und der israelischen Botschaft. Wie der Dachverband der jüdischen Gemeinden Italiens UCEI mitteilte, wird es einen Parcours von 3,5 und einen von zehn Kilometern geben.

*Judische Allgemeine, 20.1.2017.

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pilpul

Head to Heels

By Benedetto Carucci Viterbi*

As Jacob is buried In the Machpelah cave, also Esau’s head rolled into it, coming to rest on his father’s Isaac. Therefore, it is clear that his intellectual dimension is as such that he deserves to be there, together with the Patriarchs. However, there is a difference between those who work on themselves only with their head, and those who do it in full: Jacob, as his name - which he maintains even after he became Israel - suggests, elevates himself from his head to his heel (ekev in Hebrew), from him intellect, to the lowest and least sensitive part of his body.


*Benedetto Carucci viterbi is a rabbi.

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IT HAPPENED TOMORROW

Who Am I?

By Guido Vitale

“There are Jews who believe and those who don’t. There are Jews who practise and those who don’t. But there are few Jews indeed who, when their people are suffering, can walk away saying, ‘This has nothing to do with me’.
Maimonides, who defines this as ‘separating yourself from the community’ (poresh mi-darkhei ha-tsibbur, Hilkhot Teshuva 3:11), says that it is one of the sins for which you are denied a share in the world to come. This is what the Hagaddah means when it says of the wicked son that ‘because he excludes himself from the collective, he denies a fundamental principle of faith.’ What fundamental principle of faith? Faith in the collective fate and destiny of the Jewish people.” (Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks)




















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altrove/elsewhere

Secrets

By Daniel Leisawitz*

Joining a long tradition, President Obama, in the final days of his presidency, granted pardons and commutations to hundreds of people currently serving prison sentences, most of them for non-violent drug offenses. However, among the people receiving clemency is Chelsea Manning: the army intelligence officer who was convicted of leaking hundreds of thousands of government documents to Wikileaks in 2010, many of them classified military reports about the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. 
The debates over Manning’s fate, as well as that of Edward Snowden, the former CIA contractor whose dissemination of classified documents led to the revelation of various secret surveillance programs run by the US National Security Administration, get at the heart of the question of secrecy and its role in a democratic society. Is secrecy good or bad?  Are transparency and openness always to be preferred?  What about secrecy at the individual level, i.e. personal privacy? What about patents for inventions, medicines, gene sequences? Do we, or should we, have a right to secrecy/privacy?
These questions got me thinking about a fascinating book translated into English a couple years ago: Daniel Jütte’s The Age of Secrecy: Jews, Christians and the Economy of Secrets, 1400-1800 (Yale UP, 2015).

*Daniel Leisawitz is the Director of the Italian Studies Program at Muhlenberg College (Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA). The artwork is by Abraham Cresques a 14th-century Jewish Spanish cartographer.

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