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June 4, 2018 - Sivan 21, 5778

FOCUS ON ANTI-SEMITISM

Clearness and determination from Berlin

By Ada Treves*

It is only when we are saying goodbye, at the end of a long chat in English, that Ambassador Felix Klein switches to Italian. As of May 2, he is Commissioner for anti-Semitism in the German government, within the Minister for Home Affairs. The position was established from scratch in response to the growing number of worrying episodes and to handle a necessary central and coordinated intervention on a federal level.
He says he didn’t learn Italian during his stay in Milan as vice-consul, but several years before, when, at the age of 15, he got a scholarship from United World Colleges to study in Duino (northeastern Italy). He spent his last two years of high school near Trieste, obtaining the International Baccalaureate, the first step towards a prestigious career for many students at UWC. At the time the influent Austrian journalist Cornelia Vospernick and the current Canadian Minister for Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland were studying there as well. Marc Sylvester, Director of Studies back then, has total recall of him: “He was an excellent student who positively contributed both in the academic field and in cultural and voluntary activities in our institution”. Mr Klein was back Duino last summer for a former students’ reunion, but he laughs repeating that “it was such a beautiful time that I grab any excuse to go back”.

*Translated by Rachele Ferin with the help of Federica Alabiso, students at the Advanced School for Interpreters and Translators of Trieste University, interns at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities.

portraits

Rome in Mourning for the Loss
of Shoah Survivor Alberto Mieli

By Pagine Ebraiche staff*

Aged 92, Alberto Mieli, also known as Zi Pucchio, passed away last week. He was among the last Italian witnesses of the Shoah. Born in Rome on December 22, 1925, he was caught by the Fascists and the Nazis in February 1944 and then, after being held in Regina Coeli (Rome prison) and temporarily brought to Fossoli camp, he was deported to Auschwitz Birkenau.
“There is not a moment throughout the day or night my mind doesn’t go back to the life in the camps, to what my eyes were forced to see”, Alberto would say in the several meetings with youngsters in their schools. There on the schools where he talked to the young peope he would always find warmth and friendship waiting for him. Thanks also to that blunt manner of his and the likability he radiated so easily. He was a fighter, hit by his experiences, but never defeated. A fighter, but also an ambassador for hope.

*Translated by Rachele Ferin with the help of Federica Alabiso, students at the Advanced School for Interpreters and Translators of Trieste University, interns at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities.

Sports

Israeli Team Made History at Giro D’Italia

By Pagine Ebraiche staff

The Israel Cycling Academy was the first Israeli team ever to participate in a prestigious cycling race like the Giro D’Italia that after starting in Jerusalem at the beginning of May finished in Rome on Sunday May 27, 2018.
If the team didn’t succeed in winning a stage, there has still been plenty of reasons for satisfaction: the Israeli team member Guy Sagiv, 23 years old, was the first Israeli ever to complete the race. Moreover, the Spanish cyclist Ruben Plaza arrived second place in one of the mountain stages on the Alps.
After the end of the Giro, an event to honor the Academy was organized in the garden of the Great Synagogue of Rome by the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI), with the cooperation of the Jewish Community of Rome and of the Foundation of the Museum of the Shoah, and the support of the Israeli Embassy.

bechol lashon - deutsch

Woche

Pierpaolo Pinhas Punturello*

Der Punkt ist der, dass ich diese Woche wirklich nicht weiß, was ich schreiben soll.
Ich habe keinen Aufruf parat, um mit dem Setzen einer Unterschrift die Welt, Israel und das Judentum zu retten. Ich habe weder Briefe geschrieben, noch bekommen, ich habe keine heiligen und indiskutablen Positionen eingenommen, die als Erleuchtung meines Intellekts gedient hätten. Ich hatte tatsächlich eine normale Woche. Eine normale jüdische, italienische und israelische Woche. Frei von Vielfalt, heiligen Identitäten, ebenso frei vom Verurteilen der Unwürdigkeit anderer. Eine ganz normale Woche. Eine normale Woche, in der ich seltsamerweise niemanden beleidigt oder verteidigt habe. Und in diesen Zeiten ist das ein Wunder.

*Pierpaolo Pinhas Punturello, Rabbi. Übersetzung von Milena Porsch, Studentin der Universität von Regensburg und Praktikantin bei der Zeitungsredaktion der Union der jüdischen Gemeinden von Italien (UCEI).

Mehr

pilpul

Open Closed Open: Speech, Intention and Action

By Yaakov Mascetti*

When I was recently asked to write something on the weekly Torah portion (parashah) of Balak, the moment came when I had to face one of the most difficult sections in the Scriptures from the point of view of the literary structure and the motifs tackled in it. The story is structured, that is, in an extremely linear way, but which also conveys a certain lack of linearity and logic development. Traditionally, the story of how the king of Moab, Balak, sent for the gentile prophet Balaam, asking him to curse the people of Israel, for the very simple reason he fears their might in light of what they did to the Amorites, has been interpreted as one of the blatant examples of visceral hatred for the neo-redeemed Jews. Following a series of failed attempts on the part of Balak to have Balaam curse Israel, the parashah ends with the hideous and incomprehensible fall of the Israelites, who are tempted by the Midianite women and thus lapse both sexually and religiously into an idolatrous cult (Baal Peor). Is there a direct correlation between the attempts to curse the Israelites (all of which fall), and their actual fall?

*Yaakov Mascetti holds a Ph.D. and teaches at the Department of Comparative Literature, Bar Ilan University.

Read more

ITALICS

Italy Seeks to Remember Sheltering
Holocaust Survivors—and Aliyah Bet

By Rosie Whitehouse*

Menachem Krigel spent 15 months hiding in a cramped wood store in the home of a Ukrainian peasant who hid him and his mother during World War II. In the weeks after the liberation, as the frontline moved back and forth, they were separated. He has no idea what became of his mother. In his home in Haifa, as he makes coffee in his kitchen, he said recently: “This was for me the moment of trauma. I can never get it out of my mind.”
Orphaned and alone, Krigel was eventually reunited with a cousin and together they traveled to Krakow where they joined a group of survivors intent on making their way to Palestine. They were two of the 100 survivors of the 10,000 Jews who had lived in his Polish hometown of Buczacz, now Buchach in Ukraine.
Krigel became one of the 70,000 Jewish refugees who flooded into Italy after the war. He was cared for in a children’s home in Selvino in the mountains above Bergamo. The home, a former holiday camp that had been built for the children of Italy’s fascist elite, was run by Jewish soldiers from Palestine who had fought in the British army. After the liberation of Milan, the members of the Jewish Brigade and the engineering company Solel Boneh, who had fought in Italy as part of the Allied forces, devoted their energies to helping the survivors rebuild their lives and start a new life in Palestine.

*This article was published in The Tablet on May 31, 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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Special thanks to: 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.

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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.