EVENTS European Day of Jewish Culture to kick off in Parma

By Pagine Ebraiche staff*

The next European Day of Jewish Culture, which is scheduled for Sunday 15th September, will have its departure point in Parma for the first time ever. More than 80 cities in Italy and more than 30 countries in Europe will be engaged in the event.

Guided tours, concerts, kosher tastings, meetings with the authors, theatre performances and events for children will characterize this day dedicated to knowledge and to an in-depth study of the history and the traditions of the Jewish minority.

There will be hundreds of initiatives in synagogues, museums and Jewish quarters for this great national event. It will be coordinated and promoted by the European Association for the Preservation and Promotion of Jewish Culture and Heritage (AEPJ) and by the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI). Every year UCEI sees the participation of tens of thousands of people in Italy alone, with peaks of over fifty thousand visitors.

All the participating countries will be ideally revolving around a theme, which this year is about “Dreams”, a recurring one in the Jewish culture – from Torah, with the dream world appearing several times, to the Talmud, with the famous maxim “A dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which is not read”, to Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, which gave dream interpretation a profound therapeutic value.

The Italian edition of the European Day of Jewish Culture is one of the most successful in Europe thanks to the extraordinary Jewish artistic and architectural heritage that Italy houses from North to South, each region with its own distinctive trait. It is made up of tens of great and little synagogues, museums, ancient quarters, archaeological sites and a history particularly rich in culture and traditions.

So here will be a world to unveil on Sunday 15th September. It will all start in Parma and the nearby village of Soragna, which hosts a little synagogue and a Jewish museum, and will continue in other tens of towns all over Italy, for an edition which promises to be rich in initiatives and appeal.

*Translated by Mattia Stefani, helped by Claudia Azzalini, both students at the Advanced School for Interpreters and Translators of Trieste University and interns at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities.