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April 1, 2019 - Adar II, 25, 5779

culture

Exhibit on Renaissance to Debut at Museum
of Italian Judaism and the Shoah

By Rossella Tercatin

The exhibit “The Renaissance Speaks Hebrew” will be inaugurated at the Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah (MEIS) in Ferrara on April 12, 2019. It will be opened until September 15, 2019.
After delving in the first centuries of the Jewish presence on the Italian peninsula, in “Jews, an Italian story. The first thousand years”, the new exhibition will cover a crucial page of the cultural history of Italy, in the perspective of the Jewish contribution to it and the interaction with the Christian majority. The goal is to show the nuances of a complex and fruitful period, marked by the interweaving of harmony and prejudices.

News

Stumbling Blocks for Remembrance in Fiume

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By Adam Smulevich

Born and raised in Fiume, which back then was in Italy and today is in Croatia, sisters Andra and Tatiana Bucci survived Auschwitz. They were both children: Tatiana was six years old, Andra four.
Seventy-five years after the day they were arrested together with their mother and grandmother, they returned to their hometown to place ten Stolpersteine (stumbling blocks) in memory of their family members killed in the Holocaust. One of the blocks is dedicated to their little cousin Sergio De Simone. Sergio was with them in Auschwitz and was horribly killed in the basement of the Hamburg school of Bullenhuser Damm in a medical experiment.

culture

Committee for Primo Levi’s Birth Centenary: Dario Disegni Appointed President

By Pagine Ebraiche staff*

The National Committee for the celebrations of Primo Levi’s birth Centenary officially took office last week.
Dario Disegni, president of the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah, of the Jewish Community of Turin and of the Foundation for Jewish Cultural Heritage in Italy, will preside, as announced by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities in Rome in the presence of the undersecretary Lucia Borgonzoni.
The program includes many initiatives in Italy and abroad in order to spread and encourage the civic and moral lesson propelled by Primo Levi, “whose unlimited teaching represents, today more than ever, a fundamental benchmark for our society”, Disegni observed.

*Translated by Claudia Azzalini, 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.

bechol lashon - Español

El justo y el tramposo

Por Michael Ascoli*

“Dile eso al que hoy esté en campaña electoral: “cualquiera que gane honor humillando al prójimo no tendrá lugar en el más allá” (TY Chaghigà 2:1) … ¿pero de verdad los Maestros son tan ingenuos como para pensar que siempre seremos capaces de comportarnos de manera impecable, hablando bien del prójimo sin nunca atacarlo? Pues bien, lo primero que se nos ocurre responder es “¡sí!”: en la gran mayoría de los casos no solamente es posible, sino que a la larga termina por ser incluso más ventajoso. En el trabajo, por ejemplo, todas las teorías del “juego en equipo” que hacen hincapié en la oportunidad de animar a nuestros propios colegas y felicitarlos por su trabajo no están basadas en consideraciones moralistas, sino más bien utilitaristas. En suma, por lo general portarse bien no es solamente lo justo, sino que es también lo que “más nos conviene”. De acuerdo. ¿Y si en cambio nos enfrentamos con alguien mentiroso, despreciable, etc.? En ese caso, es legítimo actuar con astucia, como enseña nuestro patriarca Yaaqòv frente a Lavàn: “con el justo actuarás rectamente, con el insidioso actuarás con astucia” (Sam. 22:27 – v. TB Bavà Batrà 123a).

*Michael Ascoli, rabino. Traducido por Arianna Mercuriali, 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.

Leis mas

pilpul

Freedom, Dialogue and the Acknowledgment of the Other: Thoughts on Pesach

By Yaakov Mascetti*

As a scholar of the early modern I am obsessively interested in the variegated modalities of individuality, together with the diversified forms of tension between the particular and the general. Naturally, then, the rhetoric of freedom and redemption which the exodus saga abundantly reverses on Jewish and non-Jewish readers of the Bible is of significant interest to me. Yet, despite the widespread Western readings of this narrative, the Biblical text and its later rabbinical elaborations do not propose a redemption conceived as the “action of freeing a prisoner, captive, or slave” (OED), but rather wish to reconceive it as the process through which the individual is empowered to establish and maintain a dialogue, with fellow men or with God, and thus to perceive his or her individuality as a function of the presence of an Other. In other words, one is only truly free and redeemed when capable of turning monologue-like statements into the dangerous, fallible and disconcertingly arduous dialectics in the presence of an interlocutor.
Pesach is a social event – it takes place in the interaction with others and it brings to light generosity and acceptance.

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

Read more

ITALICS

How an Italian earthquake in 1570 created
the first Modern Orthodox Jew

By Henry Abramson*

Azariah de’ Rossi was an entirely unremarkable Italian Jew in his late 50s when the earth shook beneath his feet in the great Ferrara earthquake of November 1570.
Narrowly escaping the collapse of his home that Shabbat night, he and his family sought refuge with other survivors, Jews and Christians alike, in open fields and even aboard boats on the Po River. His encounter with Christian scholars in the aftermath of the earthquake convinced him to write a religious book, inspired by the earthquake, that described the majesty of the God’s universe.
The resultant 700-page magnum opus, titled “The Light of the Eyes,” caused an intellectually seismic event whose aftershocks would reverberate for the next 500 years: Without realizing it, Azariah de’ Rossi had essentially created Modern Orthodoxy.
According to my colleague at Touro College Rabbi Dr. Zev Eleff, who literally wrote the book on Modern Orthodoxy, it is “a movement that inspires a life that is halakhically legitimate, inspired by the promise of Religious Zionism and animated by the best of modern wisdom and culture.” (Halacha is Jewish religious law.) It would take a few centuries to flourish into a full-fledged movement (especially the religious Zionism part), but de’ Rossi’s approach to Judaism was pretty radical for the 1500s. For example, de’ Rossi was broadly inclusive of all wisdoms, regardless of their source. Elements of this orientation are evident in isolated works of Jewish physicians such as Maimonides, but de’ Rossi was much more radical, consulting controversial Jewish thinkers like Philo and Christian sources like Augustine.

*The article was published in The Jewish Telegraphic Agency on March 29, 2019.

moked è il portale dell'ebraismo italiano

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