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March 18, 2019 - Adar II, 11, 5779

news

Italian Jews Express Solidarity after Attack against Mosques in New Zealand

By Adam Smulevich

The President of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities Noemi Di Segni expressed solidarity and closeness to the Islamic community in Italy and in the world, after the horrific attacks against the mosques in Christ Church, New Zealand.
"Italian Jews express their full solidarity to Muslim communities in Italy and all over the world. Our prayers go to the victims, the survivors and their families," she said in a statement released before the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath.
"The attack against the two mosques in New Zealand is the dramatic demonstration that words of hatred and nostalgic expressions for extremist movements from the past know no boundaries and can be transformed into brutal violence everywhere. When any place of worship is affected by them, the whole civil society is in danger," President Di Segni then added.

news

"The Garden of the Righteous, a Model
for the Defense of Human Rights"

By Pagine Ebraiche staff

“The Garden of the Righteous is a symbol of the most authentic Milan: an antifascist, pragmatic and tolerant city that was awarded the gold medal for Resistance. We have always been open to the world, we believe in democratic values”, said Milan Mayor Giuseppe Sala while opening the ceremony at the Monte Stella for the installation of four new plaques dedicated to as many new Righteous.
The newly-appointed Righteous are Istvan Bibò, Simone Veil, Wangari Maathai and Denis Mukwege.
Gabriele Nissim, president of Gariwo, noted that both Veil, the first female President of the European Parliament, and Bibò, a Hungarian intellectual, are “role models of commitment to the defense of human dignity and to the fight against intolerance, which is generated by those populisms and nationalisms shaking up many nations today”.

*Translated by Rachele Ferin, with the help of Claudia Azzalini, 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.

News

Minister for Cultural Heritage Visits
Jewish Catacombs in Southern Italy

By Pagine Ebraiche staff

The Italian minister for Cultural Heritage, Alberto Bonisoli, visited the Jewish catacombs in Venosa, a small town in the Basilicata region last week.
The catacombs date back to a period between the third and the seventh century and are currently under restoration thanks to a project promoted by the Foundation for Italian Jewish Cultural Heritage with the support of the non-profit Associazione Daniela Di Castro.

bechol lashon - Français

Détournements

Gadi Luzzatto Voghera*

Lieu : Paris, 21 et 22 Février 2019, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, EHSS, (sans doute l’institution d’études historiques la plus importante d’Europe). Contexte : conférence internationale sur la nouvelle école polonaise d’histoire de la Shoah. On assiste à deux dynamiques différentes : d’un côté il y a la conférence scientifique, avec un grand nombre de relations intéressantes qui, comme c’est le cas habituellement, présentent les résultats de recherches documentaires et de recherches d’archives en suivant une méthode rigoureuse fondée sur une lecture critique des sources. De l’autre côté, on assiste à un épisode multiple de militantisme politique agressif fondé sur l’usage publique détourné de l’histoire, qui se sert de la menace, de l’agression, de l’attaque à la liberté d’expression, de la calomnie.

*Traduction de Sara Facelli, aidée par Beatrice Bandini, étudiantes de l’Ecole Superieure pour Traducteurs et Interprètes de l’Université de Trieste et stagiaires au journal de l’Union des Communautés Hébraïques Italiennes.

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double life

Red Dots

By Daniela Fubini*

Anyone who is even loosely acquainted with the hi-tech scene in Tel Aviv has been at least once on a high floor of the Electra building, across from the three Azrieli towers that used to mark Tel Aviv’s skyline in times when 46 floors above the ground were a wonder and a hubris.
Google sits on 15 of the 45 floors of the Electra, and that is a good reason enough to visit, or a very good excuse anyway. So, when on tv on an otherwise quiet Thursday evening they started showing footage of two reddish dots in the sky above that one building in Tel Aviv, and the familiar sound of a muffled “boom” made by the Iron Dome intercepting the missiles, we just stared, slightly hypnotized.

*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

Jews of Venice’s Ghetto

By Yvette Alt Miller*

On March 29, 1516, the Government of the city-state of Venice issued a new decree: henceforth all Jews must be confined to a small, polluted island within the city. The foul-smelling island was the former site of Venice’s foundries, or “ghettos”. The island was known as the Ghetto, and gave us this word’s meaning.
Nearly a thousand Jews moved to the island. Iron gates were erected at the entrances and the Jews were forced to pay for guards to make sure no Jews escaped. Jews were allowed out only during certain daylight hours; at night the drawbridges connecting the Ghetto were raised. Jewish homes were not permitted to have windows looking outward; the only source of light for buildings in the Ghetto could be apertures facing inward towards the island.
Despite these incredibly harsh rules, Jewish life flourished. Within a century, about 5,000 Jews called the Ghetto home. Unable to expand beyond the roughly seven acres that made up the Ghetto (and later, one other very small island nearby), the Jews began to build tall wooden buildings. Centuries before the invention of skyscrapers, Venice’s Jews build structures up to six stories to accommodate the thousands of residents in the overcrowded Jewish quarter. Forbidden from building synagogues, many of these tall buildings housed hidden synagogues on their top floors. Undetectable from the outside, many of these synagogues were among the most beautiful houses of worship in all of Venice, featuring ornate mosaics and woodworking, lavish paintings and exquisite gold and silver decorations.

*The article was published in Aish.com on March 18, 2019.

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.
In spite of all our efforts to avoid this, readers may find an occasional language mistake. We count on your understanding and on your help and advice to correct these mistakes and improve our publication.

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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.