Having trouble viewing this email? Click here October 26, 2020/ 8 Cheshvan, 5781
 

By Pagine ebraiche staff

From the 1970s Western Europe lost 8.5% of its Jewish population. It is a constant and relentless trend, which must start a wider reflection upon the future of European Jewry, especially since it goes together with the opposite tendency of an increasing number of people reclaiming their Jewish identity.
Both aspects are the focus of the new report by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research titled “Jews in Europe at the turn of the Millennium: Population trends and estimates”. Written by leading Jewish demographers Professor Sergio Della Pergola and Dr Daniel Staetsky, the Chair and Director of JPR’s European Jewish Demography Unit respectively, the research explores how the European Jewish population has ebbed and flowed over time. The main issue, as explained to Pagine Ebraiche Sergio Della Pergola, is not as much the decrease of the Jewish presence as the complexity of the phenomenon and the underlying processes.

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By Pagine Ebraiche staff

His narrative was unique and so his ability to take up many of the themes at the core of contemporary Jewish identity. Aldo Zargani, who died last Sunday aged 87, will be remembered an exquisite writer and an engaged public intellectual, as the readers of Pagine ebraiche - to which through the years he donated so many memorable writings – already know.
He was born in Turin in 1933. In 1995, after forty years of work at the Italian state radio and television corporation RAI, he debuted as a writer with the memoir “Per violino solo. La mia infanzia nell’Aldiqua. 1938-1945 - For Solo Violin. A Jewish Childhood in Fascist Italy”. The book, which was published by Il Mulino, reconstructs the lost world of his Jewish childhood during the perilous years 1938-45 when he and his family fled from Fascists and Nazis in northern Italy. It was an extraordinary literary debut. Not surprisingly, it won several literary awards and was translated in many languages
 

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By Pagine Ebraiche staff

"Piazza Giudia: la retata degli ebrei, 1943” by Sergio Zavoli, is one of the most fascinating documentaries about the dramatic day Roman Jews were rounded up by the SS in the Ghetto and deported to Auschwitz. Shot in 1963 and now in streaming on RayPlay (until October 30, with Hebrew subtitles), the film tells the story of the raid through documents and from the voice of some survivors. It is both an unforgettable immersion in a world overtaken by modern times and a way to go back, through places and testimonies, to the shocking reality of the day that changed forever the course of history for Italian Jews. The film was originally broadcasted by the public Italian state radio and television corporation RAI in the segment TV7 in 1963 to huge acclaim. Here is the link.
 

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By Alberto Cavaglion*

We have been a little lonelier recently. Aldo Zargani – the unforgettable author of Per violino solo – For solo violin (1995, Il Mulino) – died yesterday in Rome. Including his book among those belonging to the abundant yet not always memorable Italian memoir writings on the Holocaust of the last 30 years would wrong him. Zargani wrote much more, but one may say that he was in some kind of state of grace when he wrote those pages. Per violin solo is one of the greatest gifts Italian Judaism offered to Italian culture. We lost sight of this too soon and Zargani suffered because of the loneliness and isolation of his last years: he felt forgotten and replaced by authors who were not even close to achieving such great accomplishments as his ironic, sharp way of indirectly writing about past troubles. “Describing grief was not easy for me: on the long term, it feels like only humour and rituals can survive, while memory fades with the death of those people who had been carrying it with them”. 

* historian

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By Anna Foa*

La décapitation à Paris aux mains d’un très jeune terroriste islamique du professeur français Samuel Paty, coupable d’avoir organisé dans son cours une discussion sur la question de Charlie Hebdo et d’avoir montré deux dessins humoristiques de Mahomet, considérés blasphématoires par les fondamentalistes islamiques, remet au centre du débat, à côté du Covid-19 et des prochaines élections américaines, le sujet du terrorisme islamique, qui a été peu suivi par la presse et par le public italien au cours des mois passés. Samuel Paty, jugé par ses élèves et leurs familles comme un professeur extrêmement minutieux et compétent, a été tué parce qu’il faisait bien son travail, c’est-à-dire apprendre à réfléchir et à juger de manière critique. Son meurtre nécessite une réaction sur plusieurs fronts de la part de nous tous. Le premier, c’est de ne pas censurer, de ne pas s’autocensurer.

* historienne
Traduit par Mattia Stefani, étudiant de l’École Supérieure pour les Interprètes et les Traducteurs de Trieste et stagiaire dans le bureau du journal de l’Union des communautés juives italiennes.

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By Thomas May*

Since early in his career, Yotam Haber has grappled with what it means to be a contemporary Jewish composer. The tentative answers offered by his music — full of allusions, distortion and whispers of the past — suggest that the grappling itself is a vital part of that identity.
Mr. Haber’s most recent work, “Estro Poetico-Armonico III,” which juxtaposes a live mezzo-soprano and orchestra with decades-old recordings of Italian Jewish cantorial singing, dramatizes a subtle dialogue between creation and tradition. One of three composers to receive the Azrieli Foundation’s music prizes for 2020, Mr. Haber wrote the piece to fulfill the Azrieli Commission for Jewish Music.
The biennial awards of the foundation, based in Toronto, include two additional categories: the Prize for Jewish Music, given to an already existing recent work, and, introduced this year, the Commission for Canadian Music. (The other 2020 winners are Yitzhak Yedid and Keiko Devaux.) The Nouvel Ensemble Moderne of Montreal will livestream the premieres of all three works on medici.tv and the Azrieli Facebook page on Thursday evening.
added.
  
*This article was published in The New York Times on October 20, 2020
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