aviHng trouble viewing this email? Click here November 16, 2020/ 29 Cheshvan, 5781

By Pagine ebraiche staff

“In Italy, as in the rest of the world, elderly have been particularly vulnerable during the pandemic. Covid 19 overwhelmingly targeted them, highlighting at the same time the dramatic weaknesses of the system meant to keep them safe. In order to rethink and reform it, the Minister of health Roberto Speranza recently formed a committee that will support the government action. Presided by Monsignor Vincenzo Paglia, Grand Chancellor of the Pontifical Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences, the committee appointed many important personalities, among whom Edith Bruck, 88, a writer and poet who as a young girl survived Auschwitz and other extermination camps. “This appointment struck me. I don’t have turnkey solution and am neither an expert of bureaucracy or laws. I will give my best, doing what I do better: inspiring to think, bringing in also a piece of my experience”, Bruck explained to Pagine Ebraiche. For the writer, who was born in Hungary but have long lived in Italy, that of the elderly is “an issue of dramatic relevance, which became particularly vivid recently. It is a problem originated by the distortion through which modern society looks at the elderly, not as a treasure but a burden to get rid of”. 

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By Pagine Ebraiche staff

Renzo Gattegna, former president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities - UCEI, died in Rome last week. A civil lawyer, he was born in 1939 in Rome and had been president of UCEI from 2006 to 2016 for three terms. His death leaves an immense void in the Italian Jewish world and in Italian society as a whole. As the Italian President Sergio Mattarella highlighted in a message, through the long years he presided the Union of Italian Jewish Communities his commitment “lavished with intelligence, courtesy and balance”. “His way of being and doing has always been to me a constant teaching and will always be”, said the Presidente of UCEI Noemi Di Segni. “The whole country mourns him, and his loss as leader of Italian Judaism, as a citizen, professional, husband, father, and grandfather will be overwhelming”. During his experience at the top of UCEI, Renzo Gattegna worked intensely to make the Jewish world a leading player in national life through initiatives aimed at fostering dialogue, encounter, and confrontation of ideas, which he always carried on head-on, being fully aware of the immense legacy of over two thousand years of history and roots. 

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A month after his death, friends and family will honor in a conversation online the life and work of the writer Aldo Zargani, the unforgettable author of the memoir “Per violino solo. La mia infanzia nell’Aldiqua. 1938-1945 - For Solo Violin. A Jewish Childhood in Fascist Italy”. The meeting will be held Thursday 19th November at 20:30 on Zoom. Participate to the conversation, which will coordinated by Laura Quercioli Mincer, the Chief Rabbi of Rome Riccardo Di Segni; Marco Belpoliti, University of Bergamo; Alberto Cavaglion, University of Florence; Mirna Cicioni, University of Monash (Australia); Luigi Grazioli, managing editor of Doppiozero; Rabbi Gianfranco Di Segni, editor in chief of the quarterly La rassegna Mensile di Israel. The link will be communicated a couple of day ahead.

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Archives are our historical memory, and no one knows better than Lucrezia Signorello. A young Italian scholar, in 2017, she obtained a research scholarship from the Italian Jewish Heritage Foundation to explore, in collaboration with the Rome Jewish Community and its historical archive, the history of Jews in Rome between the 16^th and 18^th century. Her research is now a book titled Sub anulo piscatoris: un registro e una comunità ebraica nella Roma dei papi - Secoli XVI-XVIII (Sub anulo piscatoris: a register and a Jewish community in Papal Rome - 16^th and 18^th centuries), recently released by the publisher Angelo Pontecorboli. Signorello’s work focuses on a modern age register, identified as 1H7 Register of ancient documents, which is written in Latin and Italian, with the inclusions of terms and names in Hebrew. Its collection of norms, trials, and memoirs conveys a lively image of the Jewish community life in 16-18^th century Rome, offering a realistic, albeit partial, cross-section of a city and historical periods to its readers. At the time the Jewish minority was a key part of the city’s make up, able to claim its well defined otherness in modern times. The archival material, which is analyzed and partially transcribed in the book testifies both to the need of the city government to govern the daily at times conflictual interactions between Christians and Jews in the streets and squares of the Papal State’s capital, as well as offering a glance into the customs, needs, defeats and victories of a group able to defend its role in society, even though it was often resisted and questioned.

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Renzo Gattegna, langjähriger Präsident der Union jüdischer Gemeinden in Italien, ist im Alter von 81 Jahren am Dienstag in Rom gestorben. Das meldete das jüdische italienische Nachrichtenportal "Moked". Staatspräsident Sergio Mattarella würdigte Gattegna für seine "Intelligenz, Höflichkeit und Ausgewogenheit", mit der er sich an der Spitze des jüdischen Verbands engagiert habe. Gattegna stand den jüdischen Gemeinden über drei Mandate von 2006 bis 2016 vor.Der in Rom geborene Jurist trat für eine plurale und dialogfähige Gesellschaft unter den Rahmenbedingungen eines religionsneutralen Staates ein. Dabei meldete er sich immer wieder in politischen Fragen zu Wort, etwa zum Umgang mit Italiens faschistischer Vergangenheit.
 
*This article was published on Jüdische Allgemeine on November 10, 2020.

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