“A day of restitution”

Below, UCEI President Noemi Di Segni’s speech.

Distinguished President of Pisa Jewish Community, dearest students, dearest Senator Segre, Liliana to us. I would define today as a day of restitution. A restitution with a different meaning to each of us, but that converge towards a shared end. After a journey of studies, of research, of life experience that changes your knowledge, you stop and share what you learned with a certain group of people. In an ordinary restitution scenario you choose the subject, the study object, the research field.
The deepest learning/lesson in Liliana Segre’s existence has been the result of an order from above – the discrimination implemented with the anti-semitic laws of 1938 and then the physical persecution with the deportation and the survival in the extermination camp in Auschwitz. Excruciating milestones that determined her journey, but her will, her intelligence, her attachment to life allowed her to choose to make of them a restitution, to us today, to thousands of students and young for the last thirty years. With her words and with her testimony of her experience during and after the Shoah she reaches each and everyone of us.
And each and everyone of us has changed after listening to her. Not only for her message’s ability to seep into our conscience, but for the promise growing into us to act in order to stem even the likelihood of a reoccurrence of what she witnessed. Even what occurred before the horror. Liliana Segre, her testimony, her words, her presence, has not changed just me and each of you individually. She has changed a collective “us”. She has forged that sense of commitment that is not solely of the individual, but is of the community, of the public, and above all of young people.
We are, ideally, at Pisa University, a centuries-old place of knowledge, people-made – both teachers and students – where one of the most significative moments of restitution of the last years took place: the solemn ceremony, in September 2018, of apologies for the anti-Semitic laws of 1938 signed in San Rossore eighty years before. For what transpired inside the walls of a place founded on knowledge and its transmission, against Jewish teachers and students. Against those who throughout centuries gave knowledge to a unifying, fighting, emancipating Italy, and fiduciously gained it within these walls. A touching and intense ceremony, attended by all Italian universities, followed by tangible commitments and deeds, coherent with the given declarations of intent and of responsibility. Though delayed, a gesture of great depth and awareness of what was taken away: first and foremost, dignity.
The institutions justified that unacceptable Jewish condition with the argumentative ability of the highest knowledge, with the certainty that every rule of law gained authority and absoluteness, therefore immediate implementation. Restitution today emphasizes on that exactly. On being equally prominent in transmitting that knowledge which restores dignity, which refuses any hints of prevarication and negation of freedom.
Today, awarding Liliana Segre with an honorary degree represents an ulterior act of restitution from this university, to her and ideally to all who yesterday and today still have been deprived of that dignity, that truth and that great knowledge.
If Liliana Segre’s words and deeds represent a pledge getting its strength from being aware of the possibility to impact who is gifted the testimony of her experience, our pledge must be a pledge to coherence. Not of selective listening and actions. A pledge to listening and to actions similar to the one which took place at the foot of Mount Sinai. Because, unlike an ordinary commitment, which involves just the person making it, committing to Memory reverberates on the next generations. A moral obligation to tell the truth that we make for them.
Next Saturday we will read in the parashà, the weekly reading part of the Torah, the ten commandments. The biblical core of human morality, universal at least in monotheistic religions of our society. A core – we could say, a constitutional stronghold in the relationship between man and god, man and creation with the imperative of the sabbatical rest, man and their parents, man and man. And the essence of this core is the awareness of limits. Exactly what was ignored then, falling to the deep end of a total void of laws, of humanity. Exactly what must be granted today to our society. A sense of limits.
But right before this solemn reading we will understand that Moses introduces, advised by Jethro, a system of separation of powers, of decentralisation and delegation. Not only can he not stand the burden by himself, but he well understands, humbly and human, that to reach his target of presence, active listening and just decisions he has to work with others and articulate a judiciary system by levels, appoint supervisors, choosing God-fearing, truthful, incorruptible men. So, men that can reason with their own mind. Not leaders’ obedient men. Moses is told to forewarn the people about the rules and laws, the road to follow and the good deeds to be made, because you cannot judge or demand not pre-determined and unaccepted laws to be respected. It’s the basic principle of law. If you do so, said the wise Jethro to Moses, then you will have peace.
The assumption of peace is lawfulness, the decentralisation of power, sharing the moral, daily weight of the burden, appointing virtuous people, a leader’s humbleness and humanity, his awareness of his own’s limits.
Once this concept is introduced, we get to the ten commandments ceremony. A restitution as well. Because G-D also went through a journey, either planned or unintentional, that’s not for me to say, before sharing his divine knowledge. From the promise made to Abraham, reaffirmed to Isaac and Jacob, after 400 years of slavery, he gave his people the commandments, integral yet different from all his other rules.
Liliana, with your slavery during the Shoah, then in carrying the burden of memory and shared testimony, you conveyed to us the imperative of limits. You gave us a core of commandments we have heard, maybe not fully understood, it being inherently inaccessible to those who haven’t been consumed by that fire. But we commit to it for truth’s sake, disavowing corruption in any way.
The memory you commanded us is the opposite of the sabbatical one of the beauty of creation and the resting born out of respect of the divine. it is that of destruction and devastation, of doubts of the created man. Desecration’s uniqueness. Carved into our memory are the names of the concentration and extermination camps, the names of the six million exterminated Jews, Gipsies and Sinti, Jehovah Witnesses, homosexuals, disabled people, political and military opponents. The names of the survivors, the names of the just.
Each of them with their own life made of study, arts and professions, of those little objects they loved, each of them with their dream of life stolen.
It should be forbidden to murder. Forbidden to steal. Forbidden to cheat. Forbidden to give false testimony, forbidden to covet even the smallest things.
The fire of memory that cannot be extinguished and that becomes a commandment is burned into us through your words.
Who is in charge has to take advantage of the knowledge that emerges from academic research rather than disperse it, in respect of this memory and aspiring to that dimension of peace. Italy and its institutions, even the academic ones, have yet to understand and condemn the evil fascism was, stem every form of nostalgia for what is not even known, be equipped with study courses that put real history at the centre of their research, handle the defence against an anti-semitic sentiment even more legitimized by the absence of rules. They have to remember that loneliness and isolation give way to crossing the line of decency. They have to understand that millions of stories of deportation and extermination are not just Jewish history, but human and Italian history. Yet they also have to understand that Jewish history is not just made of deportation and extermination but it’s also history of life. They have to renew that pledge at the foot of Mount Sinai to receive and pass on those foundations of human coexistence, and the imperative often repeated: choose – and so, defend – life.

Translated by Silvia Bozzo, student at the Advanced School for Interpreters and Translators of Trieste University, and revised by Oyebuchi Lucia Leonard, student at Trieste University, interns at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities.