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May 28, 2018 - Sivan 14, 5778

INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE ALLIANCE

The Plenary in Rome: "Italian Vicissitudes Offer a Paradigm of Remembrance"

By Pagine Ebraiche staff*

A conference on the topic ‘The Racial Laws: Before and After the Shoah: Models, Practices and Heritage’ organized by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, its’ Italian chairmanship and the Ministero dell'Istruzione, dell'Università e della Ricerca was held in Rome on Sunday.
The conference took place on the eve of the first IHRA bi-annual plenary meeting under the Italian Chairmanship in Rome which will be held from May 28 to May 31, 2018. The current Chair of the IHRA is Ambassador Sandro De Bernardin.
During the four days almost 200 experts and policymakers from the IHRA 31 member countries, two liaison countries, nine observer countries, and seven international partner organizations will gather to discuss Holocaust education, research and remembrance as a contemporary political issue.

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INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE ALLIANCE

"Eighty Years after Racial Laws, Italy
Still Needs to Face Its Past"

The following is the speech given by the President of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities on the occasion of the Conference ‘The Racial Laws: Before and After the Shoah: Models, Practices and Heritage'.

Dear Mr. Chairman De Bernardin, Dear Representatives and Guests, Illustrious speakers,

On behalf of the 21 Italian Jewish Communities, I would like to welcome you all to Rome and to share the honor and pleasure of hosting this first cycle of meeting of the Italian Presidency of IHRA.
80 years have elapsed since the enactment in ’38 of the racist laws against Jews in Italy.
Eighty years. What does this anniversary represents? Is it a long period or a short one? Why should we speak today about it?
After decades in which Italian Jewry was fully an integral part of civil society and legally recognized after the emancipation, a series of decrees were enacted. Perfect laws, perfectly approved by all members of Parliament introduced legal exclusion of person who felt so deeply Italian, who often did not even new they were Jewish or that being Jewish would ever make a difference. They discovered that morning that they were not Italian but were Jewish. That the word legal was different from the word Justice.
These were laws that gave formal power to the power of hatred rooted by years of antifascist and Nazi propaganda.
Eighty years after Italy, as many other countries, still needs to make a profound examination of its past, of the responsibilities of the fascist regime, of trials that have never been celebrated and the responsibilities of all the Institutions that have been involved in the enactment and enforcement of the laws. Institutions that have continued to operate also after the war that instead of protecting rights protected the race and with this legitimacy traced the route of railways and trains to deportation and extermination.

INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE ALLIANCE

'Among the Different Forms of Discrimination, anti-Semitism is Specific and Peculiar'

The following is the speech given by Ambassador Sandro De Bernardin on the occasion of the Conference ‘The Racial Laws: Before and After the Shoah: Models, Practices and Heritage'.

Distinguished guests,

I welcome you to this Conference, that takes place on the day when the Giro d’Italia ends in Rome arriving from Jerushalaim, “the City of Peace”. It is a good omen for a meeting aimed at improving understanding of the reasons why too many people were (and are) denied peace on racist grounds.
When I was Ambassador in Israel, I got acquainted with the then President of the Israeli Supreme Court, Aharon Barack. He once told me: “You know, Ambassador, I see my mission as that of the supreme guarantor against the risk of arbitrary ruling of the majority against the minority”.
What a sublime definition of the rule of law and of the role of its servants!
And what an enormous difference compared to the behaviour and the moral background of those who wrote and implemented racial laws.
I have always been struck by the variety of theoretical assumptions used to justify racism, and by the fact that they often contradict each other.
The Fascist “Manifesto della Razza” of 15 July 1938 states “The concept of race is purely biological” (para. 3).
On the contrary, Hitler’s idea was that “from a genetic standpoint, there is no Jewish race. … The Jewish race is above all a community of the spirit”. (Hitler’s Table Talks, 13 February 1945).
In sum, racism cannot be easily defined.
Today racism is often stronger in societies where foreigners are less numerous. Does this mean that racism has to do with the fear of what is unknown, of what is different?

INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE ALLIANCE

“Anti-Semitism in Times of Crisis”

The following is the lecture delivered by Professor Steven T. Katz on the occasion of the Conference ‘The Racial Laws: Before and After the Shoah: Models, Practices and Heritage'.

Antisemitism as we know it was given much of its decisive character and form as a result of a crisis within the Jewish community, a crisis that arose as a consequence of the conflict between Jews who accepted the messianic claims on behalf of Jesus and those who rejected these claims. Paul is the key figure here. In his radical anti-Judaic polemic, he insists that, “all who rely on works of the law are under a curse.” (Gal. 3: 13-14). Judaism is considered to be, “a dispensation of death, carved in letters of stone... a dispensation of condemnation” (2 Cor. 3: 6-11). Judaism is dark, carnal, deadly, unredeemed and unredeeming. Even more significant, Jews are “a rebellious and apostate people.” (Rom. 10:21).
These ideas were further developed in the Gospels, that were composed for and circulated among an increasingly gentile-Christian audience. In Mark, the Jews cry: “Crucify him.” (Mark 15-12-15). In Matthew, we read: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you.” (Matthew 23: 27-39). And by the time of the Gospel of John in the second century, we read that the Jews “are of your Father, the devil.” (John 8: 43). It is no coincidence that in John’s recounting of the crucifixion there is an excessive emphasis on the guilt of the Jews who, as the followers of Satan, killed Christ and thereby signaled their primordial otherness. As John now says: “the Jews do not belong to God.” (John 8: 47). Thus, by the second century, the normative, canonical literature of Christianity had come to picture Judaism as a spiritual cadaver and the Jewish people as an apostate, deicidal mob, loyal to Satan. And very importantly, after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. this initial collision was inherited and expanded by an increasingly non-Jewish Church.

INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE ALLIANCE

"Racism and Anti-Semitism: Lessons
from a Longer Past"

The following is the lecture delivered by Professor Jean-Frédéric Schaub on the occasion of the Conference ‘The Racial Laws: Before and After the Shoah: Models, Practices and Heritage’.

My presentation invites to consider the fourteenth/fifteenth-century Iberian societies as a laboratory of racial categories, and as a first case of “guerre des races” (“war of races”), in Michel Foucault’s terms. I suggest that racial discourses and practices are situated phenomena, which first developed in relation to a part of the inner population, before affecting peoples external to everyday experience. Thus, I do not only propose a spatial and chronological displacement of the question of race within Europe, but also a shift of emphasis from the colour issue to the question of genealogy. Far from denying the crucial role played by skin colour in feeding racism, we aim at outlining the plurality of matrices of racial notions and practices that, at different times, vary from invisible genealogies through visible treats and physicality.
The term “race”, in the meaning it had through to the eighteenth century, corresponded to the Latin gens, and was a synonym for “tribe” and “nation”. Despite its restricted semantic definition, the category of “race” emerges historically when the continuity between the physical and cultural traits of peoples is stressed in discourses or political institutions.

News

European Parliament President Tajani Awarded Prize for European Jewry

By Rossella Tercatin

The Conference of European Rabbis awarded the Lord Jakobovits Prize for European Jewry to two European Union leaders, the First Vice President of the European Commission, Frans Timmermans, and the President of the European Parliament Antonio Tajani.
“Today we witness anti-Semitism taking many forms, silent and verbal. The European Parliament will always be vigilant in stopping them”, promised Tajani, who added that they explicitly asked Facebook’s head Mark Zuckerberg to work to contrast racism and anti-Semitism. “Without the Jews, Europe would not be Europe”.

bechol lashon - Español

Pueblo

Pier Paolo Punturello*

Ayer por la noche volé de Catania a Roma, para luego viajar a Tel Aviv. Cuando llegamos al aeropuerto de Roma, nos encontramos bloqueados porque las puertas correderas que conducían a los tránsitos y a las salidas no funcionaban. Mientras tanto, al otro lado, el personal aeroporturario intentaba solucionar el problema, aunque con poco éxito. Luego, tras haber arrojado la toalla, desapareció, dejando a los viajeros bloqueados entre la pasarela y las salidas inaccesibles. El estrés aumentaba, la multitud empezó a agitarse y cuatro o cinco personas destrozaron a patadas las puertas correderas y nos liberaron. Todos los que estaban allí comenzaron a aplaudir y algunos entre ellos dijeron que ese gesto popular y liberatorio era justo.

*Traducción de Mariateresa Serafino, estudiante de la Escuela Superior para Intérpretes y Traductores de la Universidad de Trieste, de prácticas en la oficina del periódico de la Unión de las Comunidades Judías Italianas.

Leis mas

pilpul

Who Am I

By David Bidussa*

I think that, in her latest book (Marranos, Einaudi), Donatella Di Cesare sees Marranism as an issue concerning modernity and anyone, Jewish or not, when she writes that “the marrano becomes the matrix of the modern Jew in his various figures. ‘What do I have to do?’ is the question that characterized Jews’ existence over the centuries. Now, it has changed into ‘who am I?’” (pp. 89-90).

*David Bidussa is a historian of ideas.
Translated by Giulia Schincariol with the help of Anna Pagetti, students at the Advanced School for Interpreters and Translators of Trieste University, interns at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities.

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ITALICS

The Careful Choreography of Prayer

By Ami Spiro*

The layout of the Western Wall is hotly debated among different Jewish religious groups. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is shared – mostly in harmony – among the Greek Orthodox, the Armenian Orthodox, the Catholic Church and several other Christian groups. The Cave of the Patriarchs is strictly divided between the areas under Jewish control and the areas under Muslim control – except for a handful of days out of the year.
These religious sites, and several others across Israel, and their strict governing rules are the focus of a new several-story installation at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice, Italy.
The Israel pavilion at the exhibition opens this weekend and will remain there for six months, providing visitors an in-depth look at several of the holiest sites around Israel and how the status quo at them is carefully, painstakingly maintained.
“What we are trying to do is to examine these places – instead of examining them in a geopolitical context or in a religious context or even in their architectural style we are trying to understand how architecture is working as an agent in exploring the mechanism through which these places are functioning,” said curator Tania Coen-Uzzielli in a recent interview.

*This article was published in The Jerusalem Post, on May 23, 2018.

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