EVENTS Leading Experts Discuss New Season of Italian Jewish Culture at Pagine Ebraiche Seminar

By Rossella Tercatin

Historian Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, the new director of the Center of Jewish Contemporary Documentation (CDEC) in Milan, and Simonetta Della Seta, who heads the Museo dell’Ebraismo Italiano e della Shoah (MEIS – Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah) in Ferrara participated in the debate that inaugurated the annual Pagine Ebraiche seminar Redazione Aperta (Open Newsroom) last week.

Redazione Aperta has been held in Trieste for the past seven years. For every edition, the staff working in the newsroom of the paper published by the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI) are joined by Jewish leaders, scholars and experts in different fields along with fellow journalists, to discuss and reflect on the state of Italian Jewish life today. In 2016, for the first time, the second week of the seminar is taking place in Venice, allowing the participants to attend some core initiatives of the 500th anniversary of the establishment of the Ghetto in the city.

At the opening discussion, Luzzatto and Della Seta spoke about the opportunities and challenges of the new season of Italian Jewish Culture. Among the topics they covered were the importance of building a network of cultural institutions, Jewish and non-Jewish, inside and outside Italian borders. They discussed strategies to get young people involved and ways to find the resources needed to fund projects. Both of them expressed their enthusiasm and optimism for the work ahead of them.