Having trouble viewing this email? Click here January 11, 2021/ 27 Tevet 5781

Among the numerous innovations and measures brought by the publication of the new Budget law on the Official Journal on December 30, which directly affect us as citizens, our family and work life, there’s one particularly interesting decision for our life as members of the Jewish community.
After long decades, the State have revised some serious aberrations of law n. 96 of 10.03.1955 (so called “Terracini”) stating “Provisions in favor of politically or racially persecuted people and of their survivor relatives” – so called Merits – with regard to racial persecution and in particular persecution against people of the Jewish faith.
Clause 373 (letter a precisely) states, first of all, that the time limit is pushed beyond September 8, 1943, thus making clear that the persecution refers to the whole period of the Nazi-fascist occupation ending with the Day of Liberation, namely April 25, 1945. Until this date, persecutions by both Nazi occupiers and fascists were still ongoing. The persecution Italy must be held accountable for isn’t just the fascist one and does not end with the invasion subsequent to the armistice.
The second fundamental element is that of the burden of proof. Up to yesterday, any applicant should present evidence of the persecutory act demonstrating the experience and suffering of acts of violence and tortures with original documents or testimonies. Other than the objective difficulty of supplying such evidence and the extremely variable evaluation of what constitutes a persecutory act, there was a mortifying subjectivity in the call for admissibility. After the shame and the exclusion from any sphere of life due to racist laws, after the physical persecution and deportation, Jews still had to demonstrate the application of such persecution towards them happened “by the book”. All of this after the formal abolition of anti-Jews laws, after the Constitution of 1947.
With the new regulation, acts of violence and torture suffered in Italy and abroad are credible unless otherwise shown. This remark surpasses the demand that the applicant present evidence, thus acknowledging (implicitly) that laws and circular letters created and promulgated in Italy were rigorously applied against the Jewish population and that it is normatively incoherent, if not morally aberrant, to ask for evidence. There still is a lot to do and to make clear as for the concept of violence and other subjective circumstances, excluded from the merit, that these amendments haven’t covered.
We must consider the change of today a fundamental one, for which a lot of work was done. The recognition for such a turning point, after more than 80 years, goes to Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, who accepted our proposal of creating a new commission to study the subject in depth, together with the MEF (Ministry of Economy and Finances) and the Ministry of Justice; to the staff of the Prime Minister’s office engaged and following the whole process to reach the definitive approval of these amendments; to the president emeritus of the Supreme Court, Giovanni Canzio, who directed the work of the designated commission, conducting the enquiry and technical legal analysis. Among other institutions, significant contribution was given by the Union of Italian Jewish Communities - UCEI, Aned (National Association of Italian political deportees from Nazi concentration camps) and Anppia (National Association of Politically Persecuted Anti-Fascist Italians), who worked alongside the experts from the MEF and the Ministry of Justice. This is not the last step to be taken and many aspects still need interpretative and normative clarifications, for which we hope this effective collaboration between UCEI, the Government and the other ministers involved will go on.
With another act of the Government, Decree n.183 of 31.12.2020, at article 13 clause 9, an extension of the terms was introduced, along with an allocation of € 6.5 million for the work on the old Jewish cemetery of Mantua within the framework of the bigger renovation project Mantova-Hub, so that it is carried out according to the religious rules, in agreement with UCEI and the Italian Rabbinical Assembly. For this effort, the Prime Minister’s office received a letter of consideration and appreciation from Israel Chief Rabbi David Lau some months ago.
 
Noemi Di Segni, President of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities 
 
Translated by Rachele Ferin and revised by Sara Facelli, 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 - UCEI.

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Over the years, the working definition for antisemitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance - IHRA, while not legally binding, has become a widely used tool around the world to educate people about antisemitism, as well as recognize and counter its manifestations. The recent publication of a specific handbook on this issue, commissioned by the European Commission and published jointly with IHRA, with support from the German Presidency of the Council of the European Union, marks another stepstone towards awareness and taking action.
This result, which is fundamental in defining a continental operational framework, was reached through an intense confrontation that saw the participation also of the Italian representation at the IHRA, the Italian Prime Minister Office and the Union of Italian Jewish Communities. The publication comes in a time of a great commitment to this matter also in Italy, where a national strategy against antisemitism is being refined, which has the definition by IHRA as its reference point and in which explicit reference is made to all the categories that constitute its concrete and current manifestation.

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An "ignoble and cowardly" act. So the president and the director of the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah - MEIS, Dario Disegni and Amedeo Spagnoletto, defined in a note the antisemitic letter received by the museum in recent days, which authorities are investigating. It is a gesture, wrote Di Segni and Spagnoletto, which "only increases the determination and tenacity with which the museum conducts and will carry out the mission assigned to it by the Italian Parliament to keep the memory alive, to fight against antisemitism and educate the new generations to the principles of equality and brotherhood that our Constitution calls on us to pursue”. "Countless demonstrations of solidarity and affectionate friendship" from authorities and citizens from all over the country, reads the note, reached the MEIS.

For Jews of Catania, Sicily, the day of June 18th 1492 marked an ultimatum. The Alhambra Decree, the Spanish edict that forced thousands to leave and others to convert to Roman Catholicism, became executive. From then on, their millenary presence, traditions, trades, and religious rituals must be erased. However, that memory survived about five centuries in documents and still tells us how Catania’s Jews used to live, work, and pray. The first to recover papers and maps was Carmine Fontana, a student who in 1900 majored with a thesis on Jews in Catania. In his research, he transcribed a vast collection of about 600 documents regarding the Jewish presence in the area from Middle Ages to the Modern Era. It was a massive task, that became even more valuable in 1944, when a fire set by a group of draft dodgers destroyed the municipal historical archives. Starting from that work, another young scholar, Andrea Giuseppe Cerra, PhD student in Political sciences, recently reconstructed the life of Jews in the city in the book Gli ebrei a Catania nel XV secolo, tra istituzioni e società (preface by Giuseppe Speciale, Bonanno Editore).

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Neatly wrapped in gray dust jackets, the books lie on the table like gifts. These are the restored books of the children of Villa Emma di Nonantola in Italy. A former summer residence of a commandant built in 1890, the building served as a refuge for Jewish children from Germany and Austria fleeing Nazi persecution in 1942 and 1943. The 96 books used by the children were discovered in 2002 in two wooden boxes in a cellar in the nearby town of Modena.
The collection, which includes school literature, religious books and social and entertainment novels, is mostly in German, but there are also works in English, Italian and Hebrew. Among them are novels by authors such as Heinrich Heine, Stefan Zweig and Thomas Mann, whose books were banned by the National Socialists as "un-German" in the spring of 1933. Some 100-odd public book burnings in over 90 German cities took place that year. 
 
This article was originally published on Deutsche Welle on January 7, 2021

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