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April 23 2018 - Iyar 8, 5778

news

A Tribute to the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt

By Pagine Ebraiche staff

The Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI) and the Embassy of Poland in Rome organized a joint ceremony to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt last week.
The event took place in the Polish embassy. The UCEI president Noemi Di Segni emphasized how the commemoration marked an opportunity for true joint remembrance, but also to point out some issues that cannot be overlooked.
“As I highlighted in a letter to President Andrzej Duda on behalf of the Jewish Communities of Italy last February, we all share a deep concern for the consequences of the law recently passed by the Polish Parliament on the matter of Polish responsibilities during the Shoah. We fear this legislation could be an obstacle to the protection of the memory of the Shoah”, Di Segni said. “We are weary of the idea that in a European country people risk being put in jail for their ideas or studies. This isn’t, nor can it be, the purpose of law”.

sportS

Gino Bartali to Receive the Honorary Posthumous Citizenship of Israel

By Pagine Ebraiche staff

Gino Bartali will be given honorary posthumous Israeli citizenship during a ceremony at Yad Vashem on Wednesday May 2, 2018. The legendary Florentine cyclist won the Giro d'Italia three times and the Tour de France twice and was recognized as a "Righteous among the Nations" in 2013 for his efforts in saving Jews during the Second World War.
Organized together with the Israel Cycling Academy, the event will take place two days before the Giro d'Italia 101st edition which will begin in Jerusalem (also the Academy will participate).

culture

A Centre for Dialogue and Coexistence

By Alain Elkann*

Simonetta Della Seta is the Director of the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah (MEIS) in Ferrara.

Simonetta Della Seta you were appointed Director of MEIS in June 2016. Can you describe the museum for me?

The museum is in a 10,000 square metres large compound inside the walls of Ferrara, which used to be the prison in the Ferrara area. We call it the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah.

Is it a state museum?

It is a state museum, based on a law voted by the Italian parliament in 2003 which commits the government of Italy to create in Ferrara a national museum on Italian Judaism and the Shoah as a very crucial chapter experienced by the Italian Jews.

*This article was published on alainelkann.com on April 22, 2018.

bechol lashon - Español

Violencia

Gadi Luzzatto Voghera*

Junto a la liberación, al paisaje y a la salvación, la “violencia” es uno de los temas centrales de la narración de la Hagadá de Pésaj. Se trata de una cuestión que normalmente se subestima y que no llama la atención de los comentaristas, es una presencia inmanente, casi obvia. Sin embargo, es una cuestión de gran actualidad porque la violencia forma parte de nuestra vida cotidiana. La referencia del texto queda clara: “En cada generación cada uno tiene que considerar como si el mismo fuese escapado de Egipto”. Una proyección importante y moderna sobre la cual debemos reflexionar. Pero en el ritual del Séder se hace en este sentido algo que distorsiona cualquier perspectiva. Cuando, mientras se enumeran las plagas que cayeron sobre el pueblo egipcio, se vierten gotas de vinagre, se pretende activar una dinámica de solidaridad hacia quien – aunque formalmente opresor y por eso autor de violencia – sufre por su parte tormento y dolor. En otras palabras, la perspectiva judía no se limita a razonar sobre el tema de la violencia, presionando para que nos situamos en la perspectiva y nos identificamos con el rol de la victima de esa violencia, sino sugiere mirar también con ojos de opresor, o sea de quien actúa dicha violencia.

*Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, Director Fundación CDEC (Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea, Centro de documentación de la historia judía). Traducción de Ilaria Vozza, estudiante de la Escuela Superior para Intérpretes y Traductores de la Universidad de Trieste, de prácticas en la oficina del periódico de la Unión de las Comunidades Judías Italianas.

Leia mas

Altrove/Elsewhere

Seventy Years

By Daniel Leisawitz*

Last Thursday and Friday, the State of Israel celebrated its 70th anniversary. On the one hand seventy years is a long time and major milestone for a small country that started out so precariously. On the other hand, three score and ten– the number of years prescribed for a full human life in the Bible – is but a passing shadow within the context of the thousands of years of Jewish history. It made me curious to take a look at where other countries were on their seventieth birthdays. I’ve just taken as examples the two countries I know best: the United States and Italy.
In 1846 the United States of America marked its seventieth anniversary. It is also the year in which we began the first war that the US would fight mainly on foreign soil: the Mexican-American War. At war’s end, the US would take control of one third of Mexico – land which is now California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico, as well as Texas, which Mexico claimed for itself, but which had seceded in 1836.

*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

Memoir of secretly baptized Jewish boy
under new scrutiny

By Nicole Winfield*

It's an incident that has stained the Vatican for 160 years: a 6-year-old Jewish boy taken from his family by papal police and brought to Rome to be raised Catholic after church authorities learned his housekeeper had secretly had him baptized.
Now the case has reared its head again, with new evidence that memoirs the boy wrote as an adult were altered to take the edge off his anti-Semitic views and enhance details favorable to the Catholic Church.
The Associated Press has confirmed findings by Brown University historian David Kertzer that Edgardo Mortara's memoirs were changed in ways big and small when they were translated from the original Spanish into Italian and published to great fanfare by Italy's Mondadori house in 2005. AP found the Spanish text in a religious order's archive this week.
The alterations do not significantly change the overall thrust of Mortara's oft-stated gratitude to the "saint" Pope Pius IX for having saved his soul by removing him from his Jewish family to raise him Catholic. But they do indicate that the tale — already subjected to over a century of revisions to suit various interests — has been recrafted again.

*This article was published in the ABC News on April 20, 2018.

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.