TURIN – Houses of Remembrance, youth work awarded

The Remembr-House/Case di Memoria project, promoted by the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah in Ferrara, along with the Compagnia di San Paolo’s 1563 Foundation for Art and Culture, aims to raise awareness about the years of Nazi-Fascist antisemitic persecution and promote knowledge of civil rights and European values. The initiative was featured at the Salone Internazionale del Libro in Turin with two educational workshops and one event where the winning projects of an international contest for young people to build a “House of Memory” were presented.
Among the award-winning institutions were the high schools “G. Soleri-A. Bertoni” in Saluzzo (Cuneo) and “A. Gallotta” in Eboli (Salerno). The former produced a work inspired by the stories of Benvenuto Lattes and Giulio Segre, who were persecuted in Saluzzo. The latter combined the project with the comparative testimonies of a grandmother, a mother, a father, and a daughter.
“We asked students and members of youth associations to design Houses of Remembrance with the help of the Remembr-House educational kit, which, starting with documents from Egeli archival holdings on the expropriations of Jewish families’ homes during the persecution, offers a path of growth and civic education that begins with the universal concept of home,” said MEIS and Turin Jewish Community President Dario Disegni – Egeli was created in 1939 to manage and eventually sell real estates and businesses taken from Italian Jews due to the racial laws. “We let imagination run wild, and the projects that arrived surprised and excited us,” Disegni also said. The selected projects will now be the focus of a traveling exhibition that will tour Europe, marking the culmination of two intense years of work.

Above, the Eboli school project.