{"id":6135,"date":"2020-02-17T10:34:24","date_gmt":"2020-02-17T09:34:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moked.it\/international\/?p=6135"},"modified":"2020-10-14T11:27:17","modified_gmt":"2020-10-14T09:27:17","slug":"italics-italian-jews-rome-renaissance-beyond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moked.it\/international\/2020\/02\/17\/italics-italian-jews-rome-renaissance-beyond\/","title":{"rendered":"ITALICS Italian Jews: Rome, the Renaissance and Beyond"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Carlin Romano*<\/strong><\/p>\n

For most Americans familiar with Italian Jewry, the images that linger come from Vittorio De Sica\u2019s evocative 1971 film, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, the Academy Award-winning picture based on Italian writer Giorgio Bassani\u2019s prize-winning 1962 novel. Set in Bassini\u2019s picturesque hometown of Ferrara, Garden mixed the beauty of provincial Italy, and the allure of gorgeous young people at ease, with a slowly mounting anxiety\u2014the creeping horror by which Italy in 1938 turned on its Jews, and captured, killed or deported some 9,000 of them.<\/p>\n

De Sica portrayed the wealthy and aristocratic sister and brother Micol and Alberto Finzi-Contini in their tennis whites, largely ignoring changing times amid the majestic poplars of their lush estate. They invited newly restricted middle-class Jewish friends to party behind their high stone walls, capturing the turning point at which Italy\u2019s assimilated Jews became outcasts.<\/p>\n

Now Ferrara, a beguiling small city located on the misty plains of Emilia-Romagna, about 55 miles southwest of Venice, is home to a new museum\u2014the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah (Museo Nazionale dell\u2019Ebraismo Italiano e della Shoah) or MEIS. Opened just two years ago in the former two-story brick prison at Via Piangipane 82 where Bassini was once incarcerated by the Fascists, the museum drew some 50,000 visitors last year.<\/p>\n

The museum came to Ferrara in a circuitous way. In 2000, the Italian government joined the United Nations and several other countries in establishing January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In April 2003, Parliament funded, to the tune of some 47 million euros, the creation of an Italian Holocaust Museum, originally slated for Rome. Subsequent discussions within the government and with the Union of Italian Jewish Communities convinced officials that their vision of a Holocaust museum was too narrow. They then decided that the museum, while paying special attention to the Holocaust, should tell the entire story of Jews in Italy. In December 2006, Parliament amended the 2003 law, creating a national museum. When the then mayor of Rome determined that his city would be better off with a municipal Shoah museum, officials decided to build the museum in Ferrara, a city in which Jews had once prospered.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are not a Jewish museum,\u201d says MEIS\u2019s director, Simonetta Della Seta. \u201cIt\u2019s important for me to say this. We are an Italian national museum dealing with the Jewish experience\u2026.We have a mission by statute, which is spreading the knowledge of the experience of the Italian Jews for 2,200 years.\u201d The goal, she adds, is to \u201ctell the story of such a long and continuous relationship between a minority and a majority. You\u2019re actually sending a message to the present that dialogue is possible. And this is very important in Europe today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Della Seta, who is Jewish, studied at Rome\u2019s La Sapienza university and earned an MA from Brandeis on a Fulbright and a joint PhD from Brandeis and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, writing on contemporary Italian Judaism. After working for a time as a journalist, she became a diplomat, serving as senior adviser to the Italian ambassador to Israel. With her short-cropped hair, bright red-framed glasses and no-nonsense insistence on accuracy in everything the museum does, Della Seta makes it clear that Italian Fascism, and the city\u2019s famed chronicler, Bassani, will never constitute her museum\u2019s marquee story. \u201cThe museum is located in Ferrara,\u201d she says. \u201cGiorgio Bassani was a Jew who was born here. He was a great writer. Of course, there has to be a relationship between the museum and Bassani. But Ferrara had other important Jews, like Isaac Lampronti, a 16th-century rabbi who wrote an anthology of the Talmud that\u2019s still in use.\u201d Thus her task is to acknowledge the influence of Bassani\u2019s fictional portrayal of the city without allowing it to dominate the museum\u2019s official mission and obscure the centuries during which Jews flourished there and influenced the country\u2019s culture.<\/p>\n

Off the beaten track for most American tourists despite being just a 30-minute train ride from popular Bologna, Ferarra is a UNESCO World Heritage Site famous for its medieval and Renaissance architecture. At its center, dominating every vista, lies the magnificent medieval Castello Estense, the towered and turreted brick fortress of the House of Este, which ruled Ferrara from 1240 to 1598. Ercole d\u2019Este (1431-1505) welcomed Sephardic Jews expelled from Iberia and left the city a remarkable array of palaces, gardens and grand avenues, as well as medieval walls and a Jewish quarter (which became the ghetto in 1624 after the Vatican seized power from the House of Este). The residence of such giants of Italian history as Lucrezia Borgia, Girolamo Savonarola and film director Michelangelo Antonioni, Ferrara punches above its weight for a city with a population now of just 132,000. Indeed, historic bars such as al Brindisi, once frequented by a clientele that included Titian and Cellini (Copernicus lived upstairs), bespeak the glorious times that MEIS itself wishes to recall. <\/p>\n

At the moment, the museum is located in two of the restored and modernized buildings of the Ferrara prison, built in 1912 and shuttered in 1992. Plans call for the addition of five new glass buildings on the site, designed to represent the five books of the Torah. When all construction is completed by 2021, the entrance to the museum, which now faces the inner city, will switch to the other side, looking out toward the river that runs through the city.<\/p>\n

Two exhibitions are currently on view in the main building. On the second floor, \u201cJews, an Italian Story: The First 1,000 Years,\u201d offers a condensed and permanent version of the museum\u2019s inaugural exhibition. Jews lived in Rome and southern Italy even before Titus conquered Jerusalem in 70 CE and took thousands of Jewish prisoners back to Rome. The exhibition details their history, showcasing more than 100 precious manuscripts, early printed books (including the oldest print edition of the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus\u2019s work), rings, seals, coins and ancient oil lamps, many bearing the image of a menorah.<\/p>\n

On the first floor, \u201cThe Renaissance Speaks Hebrew\u201d narrates a groundbreaking perspective that squares with much contemporary academic scholarship: that Jewish involvement in the Renaissance, largely omitted from standard histories, must be rediscovered and studied. \u201cThere is no Italian Renaissance without Judaism,\u201d declares Giulio Busi, cocurator of the exhibition, from a monitor at the entrance to the installation, \u201cand we would not be able to imagine Italian Judaism without the Renaissance.\u201d Busi and his wife, Silvana Greco, both scholars of the Renaissance, assembled the show and edited its catalog. The full exhibition was on view from April 12 to September 15, 2019, and has now been abridged into a second permanent exhibition.<\/p>\n

\u201cItalians take great pride in the Renaissance,\u201d says Michael Berenbaum, the original project director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and an internationally recognized expert on Jewish museums. \u201cIt\u2019s Italy\u2019s greatest moment. If Jews were an integral part of it, then Italians should learn about it. Part of the message of any diaspora community has been that where Jews have been given freedom and accepted as participants in society, the society itself has flourished.\u201d<\/p>\n

For visitors seeking something lighter, a courtyard exhibit, organized as a labyrinth, instructs strollers on the do\u2019s and don\u2019ts of Jewish culinary laws, a kind of Garden of Finicky Kashrut. Elsewhere in the museum, a 24-minute video outlines the sweep of Italian-Jewish history. Other video monitors throughout the museum present statements from a selection of contemporary Ferrara Jews about their links to the community. One video features Andrea Pesaro, age 80, who until recently was president of the Ferrara Jewish community. Bassani based his famous novel on Pesaro\u2019s family, the Finzi-Magrini. Since no real Finzi-Contini garden awaits literary pilgrims to Ferrara (Bassani invented the garden, just as he tweaked the name of the family), we watch as Pesaro takes his grandson through his own family\u2019s garden and estate.<\/p>\n

Italian Jews: Rome, the Renaissance and Beyond
\nA new national museum in a former prison in the medieval city of Ferrara illuminates more than two millennia of history. But it has yet to directly grapple with the Holocaust.
\nby Carlin Romano January 13, 2020 in Arts, Highlights, Jewish World, Winter Issue 2020\t<\/p>\n

For most Americans familiar with Italian Jewry, the images that linger come from Vittorio De Sica\u2019s evocative 1971 film, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, the Academy Award-winning picture based on Italian writer Giorgio Bassani\u2019s prize-winning 1962 novel. Set in Bassini\u2019s picturesque hometown of Ferrara, Garden mixed the beauty of provincial Italy, and the allure of gorgeous young people at ease, with a slowly mounting anxiety\u2014the creeping horror by which Italy in 1938 turned on its Jews, and captured, killed or deported some 9,000 of them.<\/p>\n

De Sica portrayed the wealthy and aristocratic sister and brother Micol and Alberto Finzi-Contini in their tennis whites, largely ignoring changing times amid the majestic poplars of their lush estate. They invited newly restricted middle-class Jewish friends to party behind their high stone walls, capturing the turning point at which Italy\u2019s assimilated Jews became outcasts.<\/p>\n

Now Ferrara, a beguiling small city located on the misty plains of Emilia-Romagna, about 55 miles southwest of Venice, is home to a new museum\u2014the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah (Museo Nazionale dell\u2019Ebraismo Italiano e della Shoah) or MEIS. Opened just two years ago in the former two-story brick prison at Via Piangipane 82 where Bassini was once incarcerated by the Fascists, the museum drew some 50,000 visitors last year.<\/p>\n

A mockup evoking a passage through the Arch of Titus and the Colosseum is from \u201cJews, an Italian Story.\u201d (Marco Caselli Nirmal\/Courtesy MEIS)<\/p>\n

The museum came to Ferrara in a circuitous way. In 2000, the Italian government joined the United Nations and several other countries in establishing January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In April 2003, Parliament funded, to the tune of some 47 million euros, the creation of an Italian Holocaust Museum, originally slated for Rome. Subsequent discussions within the government and with the Union of Italian Jewish Communities convinced officials that their vision of a Holocaust museum was too narrow. They then decided that the museum, while paying special attention to the Holocaust, should tell the entire story of Jews in Italy. In December 2006, Parliament amended the 2003 law, creating a national museum. When the then mayor of Rome determined that his city would be better off with a municipal Shoah museum, officials decided to build the museum in Ferrara, a city in which Jews had once prospered.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe goal,\u201d says museum director Della Seta, \u201cis to tell the story of such a long and continuous relationship between a minority and a majority. You\u2019re sending a message to the present that dialogue is possible\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are not a Jewish museum,\u201d says MEIS\u2019s director, Simonetta Della Seta. \u201cIt\u2019s important for me to say this. We are an Italian national museum dealing with the Jewish experience\u2026.We have a mission by statute, which is spreading the knowledge of the experience of the Italian Jews for 2,200 years.\u201d The goal, she adds, is to \u201ctell the story of such a long and continuous relationship between a minority and a majority. You\u2019re actually sending a message to the present that dialogue is possible. And this is very important in Europe today.\u201d<\/p>\n

The National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah in a former prison in Ferrara, Italy. (Marco Caselli Nirmal)<\/p>\n

Della Seta, who is Jewish, studied at Rome\u2019s La Sapienza university and earned an MA from Brandeis on a Fulbright and a joint PhD from Brandeis and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, writing on contemporary Italian Judaism. After working for a time as a journalist, she became a diplomat, serving as senior adviser to the Italian ambassador to Israel. With her short-cropped hair, bright red-framed glasses and no-nonsense insistence on accuracy in everything the museum does, Della Seta makes it clear that Italian Fascism, and the city\u2019s famed chronicler, Bassani, will never constitute her museum\u2019s marquee story. \u201cThe museum is located in Ferrara,\u201d she says. \u201cGiorgio Bassani was a Jew who was born here. He was a great writer. Of course, there has to be a relationship between the museum and Bassani. But Ferrara had other important Jews, like Isaac Lampronti, a 16th-century rabbi who wrote an anthology of the Talmud that\u2019s still in use.\u201d Thus her task is to acknowledge the influence of Bassani\u2019s fictional portrayal of the city without allowing it to dominate the museum\u2019s official mission and obscure the centuries during which Jews flourished there and influenced the country\u2019s culture.<\/p>\n

Off the beaten track for most American tourists despite being just a 30-minute train ride from popular Bologna, Ferarra is a UNESCO World Heritage Site famous for its medieval and Renaissance architecture. At its center, dominating every vista, lies the magnificent medieval Castello Estense, the towered and turreted brick fortress of the House of Este, which ruled Ferrara from 1240 to 1598. Ercole d\u2019Este (1431-1505) welcomed Sephardic Jews expelled from Iberia and left the city a remarkable array of palaces, gardens and grand avenues, as well as medieval walls and a Jewish quarter (which became the ghetto in 1624 after the Vatican seized power from the House of Este). The residence of such giants of Italian history as Lucrezia Borgia, Girolamo Savonarola and film director Michelangelo Antonioni, Ferrara punches above its weight for a city with a population now of just 132,000. Indeed, historic bars such as al Brindisi, once frequented by a clientele that included Titian and Cellini (Copernicus lived upstairs), bespeak the glorious times that MEIS itself wishes to recall.<\/p>\n

The Holy Family and the Family of Saint John the Baptist by Andrea Mantegna. (Marco Caselli Nirmal)<\/p>\n

At the moment, the museum is located in two of the restored and modernized buildings of the Ferrara prison, built in 1912 and shuttered in 1992. Plans call for the addition of five new glass buildings on the site, designed to represent the five books of the Torah. When all construction is completed by 2021, the entrance to the museum, which now faces the inner city, will switch to the other side, looking out toward the river that runs through the city.<\/p>\n

Two exhibitions are currently on view in the main building. On the second floor, \u201cJews, an Italian Story: The First 1,000 Years,\u201d offers a condensed and permanent version of the museum\u2019s inaugural exhibition. Jews lived in Rome and southern Italy even before Titus conquered Jerusalem in 70 CE and took thousands of Jewish prisoners back to Rome. The exhibition details their history, showcasing more than 100 precious manuscripts, early printed books (including the oldest print edition of the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus\u2019s work), rings, seals, coins and ancient oil lamps, many bearing the image of a menorah.<\/p>\n

On the first floor, \u201cThe Renaissance Speaks Hebrew\u201d narrates a groundbreaking perspective that squares with much contemporary academic scholarship: that Jewish involvement in the Renaissance, largely omitted from standard histories, must be rediscovered and studied. \u201cThere is no Italian Renaissance without Judaism,\u201d declares Giulio Busi, cocurator of the exhibition, from a monitor at the entrance to the installation, \u201cand we would not be able to imagine Italian Judaism without the Renaissance.\u201d Busi and his wife, Silvana Greco, both scholars of the Renaissance, assembled the show and edited its catalog. The full exhibition was on view from April 12 to September 15, 2019, and has now been abridged into a second permanent exhibition.<\/p>\n

Writer and Ferrara native Georgio Bassani; Benito Mussolini giving the Roman salute, next to Adolf Hitler. (Wikipedia)<\/p>\n

\u201cItalians take great pride in the Renaissance,\u201d says Michael Berenbaum, the original project director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and an internationally recognized expert on Jewish museums. \u201cIt\u2019s Italy\u2019s greatest moment. If Jews were an integral part of it, then Italians should learn about it. Part of the message of any diaspora community has been that where Jews have been given freedom and accepted as participants in society, the society itself has flourished.\u201d<\/p>\n

For visitors seeking something lighter, a courtyard exhibit, organized as a labyrinth, instructs strollers on the do\u2019s and don\u2019ts of Jewish culinary laws, a kind of Garden of Finicky Kashrut. Elsewhere in the museum, a 24-minute video outlines the sweep of Italian-Jewish history. Other video monitors throughout the museum present statements from a selection of contemporary Ferrara Jews about their links to the community. One video features Andrea Pesaro, age 80, who until recently was president of the Ferrara Jewish community. Bassani based his famous novel on Pesaro\u2019s family, the Finzi-Magrini. Since no real Finzi-Contini garden awaits literary pilgrims to Ferrara (Bassani invented the garden, just as he tweaked the name of the family), we watch as Pesaro takes his grandson through his own family\u2019s garden and estate.<\/p>\n

\u201cPart of the message of any diaspora community has been that where Jews have been given freedom and accepted as participants in society, the society itself has flourished.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Garden of the Finzi-Continis was, for our family, quite painful,\u201d Pesaro says. \u201cThe professor in the film comes from my grandfather, Silvio Magrini. My mother becomes Micol. My uncle Umberto is Alberto. The only one whose name remained unchanged was the dog. When the book came out, there was a rather violent reaction, especially from my father.\u201d The family objected to Bassani\u2019s depiction of the Finzi-Contini as blas\u00e9 about the threat from Fascism. Bassani, in turn, objected to De Sica\u2019s alterations of his screenplay and withdrew all cooperation on the film.<\/p>\n

The controversies about Bassani and the video of Pesaro capture in microcosm the convoluted era of Italian Jewry that serves as the museum\u2019s biggest curatorial challenge: how to portray Italian Jewry during Fascism and the Shoah and get it right. One might start with the last part of the museum\u2019s name\u2014\u201cE della Shoah\u201d (\u201cand the Shoah\u201d). Read one way, it can sound like an aberration, an effort to treat the Shoah as a late add-on\u2014as if someone had named a museum \u201cThe Museum of Modern Art\u2014and Some Postmodern Pieces That Don\u2019t Fit.\u201d But is Fascist Ferrara an indisputable central chapter in the story of Italian Jews? Or was it, and Italian Fascism in general, just a tragic page, properly limited, contextualized and placed in its appropriate slot amid a 2,200-year history? <\/p>\n

Arguments about the period escalated in 1961 with the publication of the most influential and debated work of scholarship on the Holocaust and Italian Jews, Renzo De Felice\u2019s The Jews in Fascist Italy. Since it came out, every scholar of the subject has faced off with De Felice. Jewish himself and a longtime professor at Rome\u2019s La Sapienza university, De Felice insisted that Italian Fascism and Nazism differed sharply, with Mussolini and Fascism lacking Hitler and National Socialism\u2019s \u201cbiological\u201d anti-Semitism. Almost all historians of Italian Fascism acknowledge that for the first 16 years of Mussolini\u2019s regime (1922-1938), the Fascists largely avoided harassing Jews, and thousands of Italian Jews supported and joined the party. Mussolini himself famously referred to Nazism\u2019s crude biological racism in 1934 as roba da biondi, \u201cblond bullshit,\u201d though his remarks about Jews from 1922 until his death in 1945 are rife with contradictions.<\/p>\n

De Felice\u2019s view initially triggered enormous disagreement, with multiple scholars on Italy\u2019s left labeling him an apologist for Fascism. His perspective, however, fit with a broadly held generalization accepted by many postwar Italians: that Italians behaved far better than Germans during the war, at least before the Germans occupied the northern half of Italy in 1943. It\u2019s indisputably true that Italian Jews, compared to German or Polish Jews, suffered fewer deaths and forced departures to concentration camps. In his edited collection of essays, Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922-1945, Yeshiva University historian Joshua Zimmerman noted that \u201cabout eight out of every ten Italian Jews survived the war.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, the \u201cupbeat story\u201d of Italian Jewry under Fascism faced a serious assault from scholars beginning in the late 1980s. They began to establish, as American author Alexander Stille maintains, that the behavior of Italians, often previously compared to that of the Danish (under whom Jews fared the best during Nazi occupation), fell far short of the myth. The historian Liliana Picciotto, whose Libro della Memoria remains the most exacting account of the Italian deportations, calculated originally that 6,806 Italian Jews were deported after the Nazi occupation in 1943\u20146,007 to Auschwitz\u2014and only 363 returned. In a later edition she raised the number of deportees to almost 9,000.<\/p>\n

Every Jewish museum exists within the context of its particular community, whose sometimes changing sense of history, politics and ethos exerts influence on how that museum sees itself, with tension sometimes the result. Peter Schafer, director of the Jewish Museum Berlin, resigned in June under pressure from the Central Council of Jews in Germany and the Israeli government, who felt that the museum\u2019s adversarial tilt against Israel had gone too far. The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw faces turmoil with Poland\u2019s conservative government. And in Hungary, the new House of Fates Holocaust museum in Budapest, which has yet to open, is mired in controversy over the museum\u2019s attempt to downplay the country\u2019s role in the Shoah.<\/p>\n

Italy, too, has its own unique Jewish history to contend with. To fully understand or pass judgment on the Ferrara museum, one needs to grasp the anomalies of Holocaust culture in Italy and what Alexander Stille has described as Italy\u2019s historical seesawing between \u201cextremes of persecution and tolerance.\u201d It\u2019s that very history that the museum tries to make sense of in a third, newly opened exhibition (with a focus on Ferrara) that takes visitors from the Jewish ghettos to liberation in the 19th century as part of the Risorgimento, the successful political movement to unify Italy. A fourth exhibit will zero in on Italy and the Shoah\u2014perhaps the museum\u2019s most daunting task.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, director Della Seta has to confront the ghettos and deportations, the Fascist devastation of Jewish civil rights, the silence of Pius XII during the Holocaust, and a Catholic Church hostile to Jews until recently. On the other hand, she must acknowledge the open-armed welcome Jews received for centuries from cities such as Ferrara, the prospering of Jewish prime ministers and generals after the Risorgimento, and the extraordinary acceptance of Jews as fellow Italians by their countrymen.<\/p>\n

Della Seta has a personal link to the Holocaust. \u201cI had five members of my family killed in the Shoah,\u201d she states matter-of-factly, when asked. \u201cThey were deported from Rome on October 16, 1943. My grandfather and my uncle on one side, and my grandmother and two aunts on the other.\u201d But she will not be curating on an emotional basis, she says. \u201cI was born after the war, and I was the first generation in my family after the war. I processed that, and I don\u2019t want my identity to be shaped by the Holocaust. I have chosen long ago a path of Jewish life. I am trying in my very little way to give a small contribution to Jewish life.\u201d<\/p>\n

That contribution will not include making MEIS a forum for contemporary arguments about Israeli policy or BDS. Sidestepping direct comment on the controversies in Berlin, Poland and Hungary, Della Seta declares, \u201cWe don\u2019t discuss political issues. It\u2019s too much. I don\u2019t think this museum, by law, has a mission of speaking about Israel.\u201d Then, with a twinkle in her eye, she adds, \u201cOf course, we speak about Jerusalem when we speak about Titus and Flavius Josephus.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, chief curator of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, says every museum must decide whether it wants to be \u201ca modern museum,\u201d where \u201chistory is a starting point for debate,\u201d or a \u201ctraditional museum\u201d that emphasizes \u201cconsensus\u201d and a belief in \u201cobjective history.\u201d She favors the former and sees the POLIN Museum and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as models. In her view, MEIS\u2019s success will be judged by the answer to a straightforward question about the story it tells: \u201cIs it being presented as a kind of triumphalist account of the glories of the history of Italian Jews, with Ferrara as this wonderful place, or is it what we would call a critical history, a history that is dealing critically with all dimensions of the story?\u201d<\/p>\n

Berenbaum, who, like Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, has not yet visited the museum, lived in Italy in the 1970s. He expresses hope that MEIS will recognize that it can tilt toward the museum modernism he also favors so long as its exhibits are \u201cbased on serious, detailed scholarship and rooted in facticity.\u201d He hopes the museum will be open to representing all points of view. \u201cA museum can host controversy without being controversial,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

One reason Ferrara got the nod from the founders of MEIS is that it continues to have an active, if tiny, Jewish community, as well as a non-Jewish population that largely appreciates its presence. Massimo Torrefranco, the Roman-born vice-president of the Jewish community\u2014and Della Seta\u2019s husband\u2014offers a tour of the group\u2019s historic home at Via Giuseppe Mazzini 95. Originally housing two synagogues (German and Italian), it\u2019s the oldest Jewish communal building in Italy still in use. Damaged in the 2012 Emilia region earthquake, it is currently open only to members of the community.<\/p>\n

In 1861, when most of the Italian peninsula\u2019s individual states came together to form the Kingdom of Italy (a major accomplishment of the Risorgimento), Ferrara had a Jewish population of about 3,000 in a city of 33,000. Torrefranco, stylish in a white Panama hat over a kippah, explains that while the community numbers only 80 today, his outlook is upbeat. He thinks the museum will help attract young Jewish families to Ferrara. \u201cIt will be a magnet,\u201d he says. He also notes that Ferrara benefits from its university, one of the oldest in Italy, which draws Jewish students from around the world. <\/p>\n

Asked about the attitude of Ferrara\u2019s non-Jewish residents to the new museum, Torrefanco smiles. \u201cThe average gentile in Ferrara is very familiar with Jewish culture,\u201d he says. \u201cThey consider it part of their own heritage, even though there are very few Jews left.\u201d Overt anti-Semitism in the city, he continues, is extremely rare. \u201cFor instance,\u201d he points out, \u201cone of the focuses for anti-Semitic acts and vandalism all over Europe is always the cemetery. And we haven\u2019t had anything. The cemetery is particularly beautiful, huge and authentic. It is also quite exceptional in that it is owned by the Jewish community\u2014it is not state- or city-owned land given to the community. It is ours.\u201d<\/p>\n

Generally, the attitude toward the museum is positive, he says, because people \u201csee it as an opportunity to increase tourism in Ferrara and possibly to generate more work.\u201d And, of course, there\u2019s always the Bassani factor\u2014the focus of unending local interest. This year The Garden of the Finzi-Continis was the subject of the city\u2019s high school exam. Its renowned author lies buried here in the Jewish cemetery, far out in its most distant corner, under the towering cypresses.<\/p>\n

*The article was published in Moment on January 2020.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Carlin Romano* For most Americans familiar with Italian Jewry, the images that linger come from Vittorio De Sica\u2019s evocative 1971 film, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, the Academy Award-winning picture based on Italian writer Giorgio Bassani\u2019s prize-winning 1962 novel. 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