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May 13, 2019 - Iyar 8, 5779

events

The Turin Book Fair Honors Primo Levi

By Rossella Tercatin

The Turin International Book Fair took place between May 9 and May 13, 2019.
Many events were devoted to honor the centennial from the birth of the Turin-born writer and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi.
The 2019 edition of the Fair had been at the center of a controversy because a Fascist-leaning publisher had booked a stand there. Several speakers announced they would no longer attend the event until the stand of the publisher was revoked.

News

Prime Minister Conte at the Great Synagogue: "Antisemitism is Europe's suicide"

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By Pagine Ebraiche staff

"Anti-Semitism is the suicide of the European man because when the European man rejects the Jewish man, he also rejects himself and denies a fundamental part of his own identity".
This is a clear message from Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, who has spoken at the Great Synagogue of Rome last week. He was invited to the Jewish neighborhood to welcome a delegation of 800 youths from over 50 Russian cities on their visit to Rome under the leadership of Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar.
Their trip is part of the ‘Yachad' project of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, held annually in a different European capital before moving to Auschwitz, where it usually ends. This year the project is also celebrating the 100th anniversary of Primo Levi's birth.
The President of the Jewish Community of Rome Ruth Dureghello, Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni and Holocaust survivor Sami Modiano welcomed Giuseppe Conte to the Great Synagogue of Rome.
"The extraordinary experience of Primo Levi clearly shows how art is capable of giving a voice to people's feelings, commemorating the past in the highest sense of the word", the Prime Minister said..

Translated by Arianna Mercuriali, student at the Advanced School for Interpreters and Translators of the University of Trieste, intern at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities.

culture

The Auschwitz Memorial to Commemorate Italian Victims Reopened in Florence

By Adam Smulevich

The Auschwitz Memorial built to remember the Italian victims of deportation found a new home in the city of Florence.
Originally set up in a lager by the National Association of ex-deportees in Nazi camps in 1980, the monument was moved to Italy some years ago when the Auschwitz Museum contacted the Italian authorities to inform them that it no longer respected the standard of a modern museum, a new location was needed.
This marked the beginning of a controversy behind which many have seen political motivations.
To save the Memorial, which had also received a contribution by Primo Levi, the city of Florence offered its help along with the support of the Tuscany Region and other institutions, including the Union of Italian Jewish Communities.

bechol lashon - deutsch

Schürzen und Disziplin

Anna Foa*

„Schürzen und Uniformen, Ordnung und Disziplin“. Dies ist das vom Minister Salvini vorgeschlagene Rezept, um die Probleme, die unsere Schule belasten, zu lösen. Das geschieht während die Umfragen uns zeigen, dass ein großer Prozentsatz unserer Schüler, der die mittlere Reife bekommt, schwache Kenntnisse im Lesen und Schreiben hat. Weder die Aufmerksamkeit auf das kulturelle Niveau der Schüler und Dozenten, noch die Sorge für die Inhalte des Lernprozesses, sondern Schürzen und Disziplin. Nicht die Wiedereinführung der Geschichte in den Lehrplan, die vor kurzem Hunderte von Unterschriften, darunter die der Senatorin Liliana Segre, dem italienischen Bildungsministerium beantragen haben, sondern Ordnung und Schürzen. Nicht die Erziehung zur Betrachtung des Wissens, statt der Unwissenheit, als positives Wert, sondern Uniformen und Disziplin. Und welche Farbe sollten diese Uniformen haben? Schwarz, vermute ich.

*Anna Foa, Historikerin. Übersetzung von Anna Zanette, mit der Hilfe von Giulia Schincariol, beide Studentinnen der Hochschule für Dolmetscher und Übersetzer der Universität von Trieste und Praktikantinnen bei der Zeitungsredaktion der Union der jüdischen Gemeinden von Italien (UCEI).

Mehr

pilpul

Being Vulnerable
in a Strong Context

By Yaakov Mascetti*

For once I am not going to be addressing here Jewish matters, in the strenuous effort to justify humanistic values, the inevitable presence of the “Other,” and a staunchly iconoclastic conception of the Divine. What I am also not going to do is rant about pseudo-pagan ideas of providence, and conflations of the material and the spiritual. And I am not going to address political issues, or at least not directly – mostly because these days political disputes have become, thanks to the social networks, populated by a plethora of simplistic statements, vague and ironic memes, and 140-character long mantras against this or that. Tired of this lack in dialogue, I closed my Facebook account last year and haven’t regretted once.

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

Read more

ITALICS

Pope urged by Jews to take care
over Pharisees talk

By AFP and TOI staff*

Pope Francis is being urged by experts to take greater care when referring to “hypocritical” Pharisees, a stereotype that fueled centuries of bad blood between Catholics and Jews.
Catholic-Jewish relations blossomed after the Second Vatican Council — which in 1965 finally urged respect for Judaism — and Francis is a clear friend of the Jews, insisting the Church continue to apologize for anti-Semitism.
But for centuries, Jesus’s Jewish origins were obscured and the Jews were held collectively responsible for his death.
And the pontiff’s tendency to quote directly from New Testament passages where Jesus slams members of the small religious and political group as “hypocrites” has been troubling rabbis concerned about anti-Semitism.
Some 400 Jewish and Christian Bible scholars gathered in Rome last week to exchange research notes on the Pharisees, a group about which little is known historically but which came to represent all Jews in Catholic tradition. To Jews, the Pharisees include some of the earliest of the Sages whose collective legal and spiritual debates over some seven centuries, until the fifth century CE, are recorded in the vast compilation called the Talmud, Judaism’s central post-Biblical text.
But the image of the “treacherous” Pharisees appears down the centuries in dictionaries, academic articles, films and Protestant and Catholic preaching, with the word “Pharisee” becoming a synonym for hypocrite in the West.
“They lacked life. They were, so to speak, ‘starched.’ They were rigid… The people didn’t matter to them: The Law mattered to them,” Francis said of Pharisees in a homily in October.

*The article was published in The Times of Israel on May 12, 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.