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January 21, 2019 - Shevat 15, 5779

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Italian PM Visits Rome’s Great Synagogue

By Adam Smulevich*

Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte visited the Great Synagogue of Rome on Friday. He was escorted by the President of the local Jewish community Ruth Dureghello, the Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni and the President of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities Noemi Di Segni.
The visit focused on many themes: the open wound of the Shoah a few days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, but also the contribution of Italian Jewry to the life and progress of Italian society over the course of two millennia of history. Some concerns were also expressed by Jewish leaders about the social situation in the country and the general growth of hatred.
"We are worried as Jews, but we are above all Italians. We are worried because we perceive animosity in the public debate and violence in the language that produces this phenomena which too often we find ourselves stigmatized," highlighted President Dureghello in her remarks.

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President Sergio Mattarella Visits
Shoah Memorial in Berlin

By Pagine Ebraiche staff*

The President of the Italian Republic Sergio Mattarella visited the Shoah Memorial in Berlin, where he is on a State visit.
“The passing of time has entrusted these sites with the crucial task of keeping the memory of the barbaric acts committed alive, a permanent warning so that what happened will never occur again”, he wrote in the visitors’ book.

news

Stolen Stolpersteine in Rome Relocated

By Pagine Ebraiche staff

The void has been filled, thus turning the city’s wound into a collective moment of awareness and commitment. After being stolen in the Monti district in December, the stolpersteine to remember the Di Castro and Di Consiglio families, slaughtered by the Nazi-Fascist troops, have gone back to their place. New brass plates now replace the ones stolen during the last few weeks.
German artist Gunter Demnig affixed the plates himself. He invented this art form for the remembrance of the holocaust many years ago, and he is now travelling throughout Europe with a mission. He was convened in Rome for the tenth time by the Italian association Arte in Memoria, headed by Adachiara Zevi. The association has placed more than 300 stones in the middle of town up until now.

bechol lashon - Español

Comunicación

Gadi Luzzatto Voghera*

Hay algo malo en el mundo de la comunicación. Quizás una falta de disciplina y de responsabilidad. Tomemos como ejemplo la lucha contra el racismo en los estadios y, más en general, en el mundo del deporte. Una organización compleja, en la que participan asociaciones, iniciativas ciudadanas y hasta la Presidencia del Consejo se compromete para promover un evento como “Run for Mem” (Turín, 27 de enero próximo), una carrera no competitiva en su tercera edición que, en la línea de la memoria de la Shoah, se propone transmitir el valor positivo, unificador y profundamente humano de la actividad deportiva, contra cualquier discriminación o forma de racismo. Probablemente mucha gente participará, y esto es un evento que -como se dice en la jerga periodística- "es noticia", especialmente en una época en la que cada vez más, cuando se habla de deporte, uno está obligado a asociarle el término "violencia". Pero los medios de comunicación parecen no estar muy interesados en el tema, lo relegan a sueltos en los comunicados de prensa.

*Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, director de la fundación CDEC (Centro de documentación de la historia judía). Traducción de Anna Zanette, 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

double life

Food Again

By Daniela Fubini*

Our waistline barely survived the fried and then baked sweets that attack all our senses for at least two weeks every December (and this year due to the distance between Chanukka and the end of the year almost one full month). We are trying to get back into shape - any shape, at this point - and here it strikes again: Tu BiShvat.
Mountains of nuts and dried fruit take over even the most humble supermarket. The simplest apple cake gets a seasonal twist consisting in adding an impossible amount of nuts and raisins to the recipe. In Italy, past and forgotten the fluffy glory of Panettone and Pandoro, high rise cakes fashionable only until the first week of January, is now a good season for Castagnaccio, a flat chestnut cake, almost not sweet at all, and for other very flat cakes like Panpepato (chocolate and almonds based) and Panforte (dried fruit based). So it looks like the difference between the beginning of the winter and its peak can be described as a switch between a lot of sugars and long leavening to lot of sugars with zero or close to zero leavening.

*Daniela Fubini (Twitter @d_fubini) lives and writes in Israel, where she arrived in 2008 from Turin via New York.

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ITALICS

Italy's Unheralded Role in Securing Support for the Balfour Declaration, and Beyond

By Ofir Haivry*

This month marks the 100th anniversary of the Paris peace conference that formally terminated World War I and led, among other things, to international recognition by the victorious allies of the national rights of the Jewish people.
Much has been written about these events and, where Zionist activity is concerned, about the prior runup to them that in Great Britain culminated in the November 1917 issuance of the Balfour Declaration. Significant credit for that triumph, as Martin Kramer has demonstrated in Mosaic, is due not only to the seminal figure of Chaim Weizmann but also, in particular, to the diplomatic genius of Nahum Sokolow, who played a key role in securing both French and Italian support for the British initiative.
But there is much more to be said about the Italian role, which too often has been relegated to a peripheral status in historical accounts of the period. In fact, Italy took an important part both before the issuance of the Balfour Declaration and afterward—especially at the Paris peace conference, where it crucially assisted Zionist efforts to secure from the victorious allies an actual, agreed-upon policy. Both earlier and later, several prominently placed Italian Jews were conspicuously involved, but the crucial role was filled by the Italian foreign minister Sidney Sonnino, the son of a converted Jewish father.

*The article was published in Mosaic on January 9, 2019.

moked è il portale dell'ebraismo italiano

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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.