By Cnaan Liphshiz* The outbreak of the coronavirus in northern Italy forced Claudia Bagnarelli to make a painful choice. “To keep visiting my 94-year-old mother, I needed to stop seeing everyone else in my life,” Bagnarelli, a Jewish ballet teacher from Milan, said Monday. To avoid the risk of infecting her mother with the virus, …
By Ben Sales Aboud Dandachi isn’t Jewish. Or Israeli. Or Italian. Or sick with coronavirus. He’s a Muslim from Syria living in Canada. But when he read the Jewish Telegraphic Agency story about an Italian boy whose bar mitzvah was curtailed because of the rapidly spreading virus, Dandachi responded in a way he figured Jews …
By Ben Sales* Ruben Golran had studied for a year and a half in anticipation of this week, when 600 of his relatives and friends were supposed to converge on Milan to celebrate his bar mitzvah. First he planned to have a ceremony Tuesday, when he would put on tefillin, a Jewish ritual object, for …
By AFP* The March 2 unsealing of the archives of Pope Pius XII, the controversial World War II-era pontiff, whose papacy lasted from 1939 to 1958, has been awaited for decades by Jewish groups and historians. The controversy over Pius XII hinges on whether the head of the Catholic Church, a former diplomat of the …
By Carlin Romano* For most Americans familiar with Italian Jewry, the images that linger come from Vittorio De Sica’s evocative 1971 film, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, the Academy Award-winning picture based on Italian writer Giorgio Bassani’s prize-winning 1962 novel. Set in Bassini’s picturesque hometown of Ferrara, Garden mixed the beauty of provincial Italy, and …
*JTA Christians and Jews in Milan, Italy, are jointly hosting a Muslim family that fled from the fighting in Syria. The family of seven from Aleppo immigrated to Italy legally as asylum seekers and are being hosted at an apartment in Milan by the Union of Italian Jewish Communities and the Jewish Community of Milan. …
By JTA* More than 15 percent of respondents to a poll in Italy said the Holocaust never happened. The results are part of the annual Eurispes Italy Report published Thursday. The poll by the non-governmental organization probes Italians’ views on a number of subjects, including the credibility of the government, the media and history, this …
By Collen Bary Anti-Semitic writing was scrawled overnight on the door of a now-deceased member of the Italian anti-Fascist resistance who survived a Nazi concentration camp, a family friend and historian wrote Friday on Facebook. “Juden Hier,” German for “Jews Here,” with a Star of David was written in black paint on the door of …
By JTA staff* Police in the northeast Italian city of Trieste analyzed security videos to identify and arrest a man suspected of vandalizing the city’s synagogue twice in the past few months. The suspect was accused of breaking two windows “for the purposes of ethnic-religious hatred,” police said. A statement issued this week said careful …
By Fredric Brandfon* The earliest example of the fear that Jews might overturn and replace the social order with their own people probably occurred in Rome during the first century CE. A circumstance arose that threatened Roman dominion over the Mediterranean world: The Flavian family line was in danger of being replaced through a Jewish …
ROME — Italian Jewish leaders voiced solidarity with former member of parliament Arturo Scotto, who was punched in the face by youths shouting about Anne Frank in Venice’s St. Mark’s Square on New Year’s Eve. Police in Venice are investigating the incident. Scotto, a former leftist member of parliament who is not Jewish, wrote in …
POMPEII, Italy — In the gift shop at the Pompeii archaeological site, tourists might notice a book entitled, “The Jews in Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae and in the Cities of Campania Felix.” Dedicated “to the Jewish victims of the eruption of 79 CE,” it claims that a Jewish author was actually the first to record the …
By David Ruben Josephus’s The Jewish War, a Biography by Martin Goodman (Princeton University Press, £20) Flavius Josephus, son of Matthias haKohen, better known as Josephus, was well known to many earlier generations of Jews through a popular book wrongly attributed to him, probably written in the latter half of the first millennium. Passages from …
By CBS staff* During the Holocaust, an entire generation of talented musicians, composers and virtuosos died, but their musical legacy lives on thanks largely to the extraordinary efforts of Francesco Lotoro. An Italian composer and pianist who converted to Judaism, Lotoro is on a mission or “mitzvah” – a Jewish duty – to recover, catalog …
By Frances D’Emilio* Piero Terracina, described as the last survivor among the Roman Jews who were deported from the Italian capital to Nazi death camps during World War II, has died at 91. Terracina died on Sunday, Rome’s Jewish Community said. As a 15-year-old, he escaped the roundup by German occupying troops of Rome’s Jews …
By TOI staff* A posthumous award was granted Tuesday in Jerusalem to the former chief rabbi of Florence who was a leader of the Italian city’s Jewish-Christian underground rescue network during the Holocaust. The Committee to Recognize the Heroism of Jews who Rescued Fellow Jews during the Holocaust and the Bnai Brith World Center granted …
By Ansa staff* The city of Rome on Thursday changed the names of two streets devoted to Edoardo Zavattari and Arturo Donaggio, who were among the Italian scientists to sign Benito Mussolini’s racial laws in 1938 and which led to the ferocious persecution of Italy’s Jews during World War II. The streets were renamed after …
By Elana Horwich Jews have a long history in Italy. In fact, Rome has Europe’s oldest Jewish community. When the Roman Empire conquered Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, it sent the Jewish people from their holy land into the Diaspora, with different tribes settling in different regions. Jews who settled in Spain are called Sephardic, while …
By Eleanor Foa* My father, an Italian Jew, used to say that “family is everything,” yet I knew very little about the history of the Foà family. That changed when, in his retirement, my father wrote a forty-page family memoir and began to fill in some of the missing pieces. He devoted only one line …
By Ansa staff Ruth Dureghello, the president of Rome’s Jewish Community, on Thursday expressed dismay that the rightwing League and Brothers of Italy (FdI) parties and Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia (FI) did not vote in favour of creating an extraordinary commission against hate, racism and anti-semitism. The motion to create the commission, proposed by …