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October 16, 2017 - Tishri 26, 5778

NEWS

Italy Ratifies European Union Legislation
on Holocaust Denial

By Adam Smulevich

Filling a gap that had lasted many years, last week the Italian Senate adopted, with a large majority, the European Union's decision on punishing Holocaust denial, genocide, and other crimes against humanity (also considering aggravating circumstances).
According to the upgrade of the law currently in force, known as Legge Mancino, not only the denial of the Shoah but also a trivialization and apology of Nazi-fascism will be considered as aggravation of the criminal offence. "A necessary step due for the citizens of Italy of yesterday and today," highlighted the President of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities Noemi Di Segni in a note.

Culture

Rights and Responsibilities of Marriage:
What the Roman Ketubot Tells Us

By Pagine Ebraiche staff

It was the first form of protection of women in Judaism, which gives a central role to the union between husband and wife (“It is not good that the man should be alone," it says in Genesis). But it is also a different way, a more original perspective to look at the history of the Italian Jews and their complex spatio-temporal stories. It’s the ketubot, the marriage contracts stipulated on the occasion of the wedding, the subject of the exhibition “Concordia maritale” (“Marital harmony”), which opened at the Jewish Museum of Rome.
The exhibition has been put together thanks to the support of the Poste Italiane and curated by scholar Olga Melasecchi. It was also introduced by the chief rabbi rav Riccardo Di Segni, who explained the history and the characteristics of the various contracts that were used over the centuries (not only in Rome). The exhibition brings to the attention of the public an old collection of objects that provoked interest and emotion. There are also old photos of weddings, archival documents and prayer books.

Translation by Sara Volpe, student at the Advanced School for Interpreters and Translators of Trieste University, intern at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities.

Culture

The MEIS Ready to Debut in New York

By Pagine Ebraiche staff

The Museum of the Italian Judaism and the Shoah (MEIS) in Ferrara produced a documentary on the history of the Italian Jewish Community that will preview this week in New York. The short movie, called "Through The Eyes Of Italian Jews," will be screened at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University during the event “World Cultural Conservation. Italy at the Forefront: Innovation versus Constraints”, featuring the Ministry of Cultural Heritage Daio Franceschini, the director of the Academy David Freedberg, and the MEIS President Dario Disegni.

bechol lashon - deutsch

Funktionaler Analphabetismus

Francesco Moises Bassano*

Die Umfrage OCSE-PIAAC behauptet, dass Italien das europäische Land mit der größten Anzahl an funktionalen Analphabeten ist. Darunter versteht man diejenigen, die zwar lesen und schreiben können, jedoch nicht in der Lage sind, diese Fähigkeit zu nutzen, um an nützliche Informationen zu kommen und den Sinn eines Textes zu verstehen. Dieser Missstand könnte Ursache für einige der in den letzten Jahren vorgekommenen Ereignisse und Phänomene von Intoleranz sein, wie beispielsweise das aggressive Verhalten der Anti-Vax-Anhänger gegenüber den drei Abgeordneten der Demokratischen Partei Italiens (PD). Dieser funktionale Analphabetismus muss auch auf globaler Ebene zu den größten Problemen des 21. Jahrhunderts gezählt werden, so wie der reine Analphabetismus zu denen des vorherigen Jahrhunderts. Für viele ist der funktionale Analphabetismus jedoch bequem, da er als wesentliches Mittel zur Mobilisierung der Massen für politische Bewegungen dient, die als „populistisch“, neo-nationalistisch, identitär, pro-exit und sogar islamistisch gelten.

Translation made by Clara Erhet, student at Regensburg University, intern at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities.

Mehr

pilpul

Shemini Atzeret

By Daniel Leisawitz*

According to Dr. Michele Brunetti, researcher at ISAC-CNR (Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate – Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche), “[the] summer of 2017 will not only be remembered for the heat, but also, and above all, for the severe problems of drought. Although it may have been easy to overlook the grave danger of climate change this summer where I live, in the northeastern United States, the residents of Italy, and much of the rest of the world, were afforded no such indulgence.
Italy suffered through stretches of record heat in June and August, reaching an apex on Aug. 4: the hottest day ever recorded for many cities in Sardegna and across central Italy. The prolonged extreme heat was problematic enough, but it was compounded by record drought across the peninsula. By the end of August, the average rainfall total reached a deficit of -41%. As if to put this scarcity of water in millennial terms, the news that the city of Rome had decided to close the spigots of many of its hundreds of ceaselessly flowing fountains in an effort to conserve water was splashed across the front pages of newspapers, and images of centuries-old fountains sitting dry under the baking sun were shown repeatedly on tv.

*Daniel Leisawitz is the Director of the Italian Studies Program at Muhlenberg College (Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA). The artwork is by Abraham Cresques a 14th-century Jewish Spanish cartographer.

Read more

italics

“Like stars in a complex constellation, these objects convey the sweep of Jewish history”

By Rebecca Abrams*

We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky, wrote the late, great Leonard Cohen, and perhaps it is this lurking fear of eclipse that explains our desire to preserve the material proof of our presence. Museums are not only treasure troves of material proof that we humans are here and are large, they provide the bulwark of the past as protection against the alarming expanse of the future. Stories in many ways serve the same function, curating the random evidence of existence into meaningful narratives. But inevitably, both museums and stories are selective in how they arrange the evidence, depending on whose story they’re curating, whose presence they’re preserving. Oxford, where I’ve lived for nearly three decades, is home to one of the oldest and greatest museums in the world: the Ashmolean, founded by Elias Ashmole in 1683. When I used to visit as a child, I wasn’t much interested in the past. Egyptian mummies did the job just fine, the creepier the better. The allure of history has grown as I’ve got older, both history in general and those parts of it I can relate to personally. A few years ago, however, as a Jewish visitor to the Ashmolean, I began to realise that “my” history, although present among the vast riches of the museum’s collections, was at the same time curiously hard to see, a faint thread that wove through its galleries but was easily lost. The same is true for many other histories, of course, because curatorial choices have to be made. But in the case of Jewish history, the material evidence was there, on display in many different forms in nearly every gallery. It was just strangely difficult to find, and once found, strangely difficult to make sense of. Absorbed into different and sometimes competing narratives, the specifically Jewish meaning of these objects, even when you knew where to look, remained highly elusive.

*This article was published in the Guardian on October 15, 2017.

moked è il portale dell'ebraismo italiano

This newsletter is published under difficult conditions. The editors of this newsletter are Italian journalists whose native language is Italian. They are willing to offer their energy and their skills to give international readers the opportunity of learning more about the Italian Jewish world, its values, its culture and its traditions.
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Realizzato con il contributo di: Francesco Moises Bassano, Susanna Barki, Amanda Benjamin, Monica Bizzio, Angelica Edna Calò Livne, Eliezer Di Martino, Alain Elkann, Dori Fleekop, Daniela Fubini, Benedetta Guetta, Sarah Kaminski, Daniel Leisawitz, Annette Leckart, Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, Yaakov Mascetti, Francesca Matalon, Jonathan Misrachi, Anna Momigliano, Giovanni Montenero, Elèna Mortara, Sabina Muccigrosso, Lisa Palmieri Billig, Jazmine Pignatello, Shirley Piperno, Giandomenico Pozzi, Daniel Reichel, Colby Robbins, Danielle Rockman, Lindsay Shedlin, Michael Sierra, Rachel Silvera, Adam Smulevich, Simone Somekh, Rossella Tercatin, Ada Treves, Lauren Waldman, Sahar Zivan.