Having trouble viewing this email? Click here February 8, 2021 - 26 Shevat 5781

By Pagine Ebraiche staff

Her constant dedication in promoting “social justice, peaceful coexisting and the disavowal of any conflict” earned Liliana Segre a new honorary degree in Peace Studies, awarded to her last week by Pisa University. The ceremony was held in the concert hall of the university centre San Rossore 1938, a name which commemorates the racial laws signed there by King Vittorio Emanuele III that very year.
Among the many merits of the Senator for Life there is “upholding the history and the Memory of the Shoah, making it an instrument to nurture, among youngster first and foremost, those values of fellowship and respect in which our university fully identifies”, Dean Paolo Mancarella noted.
She is an extraordinary peace ambassador, “in a time where Italy finds itself divided and inconsistent with values that are supposed to be shared”.
Ideally, for Pisa University this is the continuation of the commitment made in the eightieth anniversary of the promulgation of the anti-semitic policies through the “ceremony of apologies and remembrance”, dedicated to the Jewish teachers and students who were then ousted.

Translated by Silvia Bozzo, student at the Advanced School for Interpreters and Translators of Trieste University, and revised by Oyebuchi Lucia Leonard, student at Trieste University, interns at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities.

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Below, UCEI President Noemi Di Segni’s speech.
Distinguished President of Pisa Jewish Community, dearest students, dearest Senator Segre, Liliana to us. I would define today as a day of restitution. A restitution with a different meaning to each of us, but that converge towards a shared end. After a journey of studies, of research, of life experience that changes your knowledge, you stop and share what you learned with a certain group of people. In an ordinary restitution scenario you choose the subject, the study object, the research field.
The deepest learning/lesson in Liliana Segre’s existence has been the result of an order from above – the discrimination implemented with the anti-semitic laws of 1938 and then the physical persecution with the deportation and the survival in the extermination camp in Auschwitz. Excruciating milestones that determined her journey, but her will, her intelligence, her attachment to life allowed her to choose to make of them a restitution, to us today, to thousands of students and young for the last thirty years. With her words and with her testimony of her experience during and after the Shoah she reaches each and everyone of us.

Translated by Silvia Bozzo, student at the Advanced School for Interpreters and Translators of Trieste University, and revised by Oyebuchi Lucia Leonard, student at Trieste University, interns at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities.

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By Miriam P. Carmi

Despite the rain and the Covid-19 virus, a small delegation from the organisations involved in the discovery of the concentration camp gathered there in the past hours in Montorio - a village near Verona - before the site’s commemorative plaque. Used for this purpose in early 1944 – then a place of detention of political prisoners until the end of World War II – it saw the presence of about sixty Jews, who were subsequently transferred to Fossoli and then to Auschwitz.
The precise identification and its identification as a “concentration camp” has been made thanks to some letters found, together with the administrative acts of the time and the testimonies in which the survivors had detailed their experience, the commemorative plaque and some explanatory signs with photos placed in a point particularly important for the citizens use, next to a pedestrian path and the cycle path. Only in 2017 a commemorative plaque and some explanatory signs with photos were placed in a particularly important point for use by citizens, being next to a pedestrian and cycle path.

Translated by Oyebuchi Lucia Leonard and revised by Silvia Bozzo, students at Trieste University and the Advanced school for interpreters and Translators of Trieste University, intern at the newspaper office of the union of the Italian Jewish Communities.

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Starting from July, the Israeli historian and educator Avinoam Shalev is the 24th Director of the prestigious American Academy in Rome. He is currently the Riggio Professor for the Arts of Islam in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. He studied at the University of Tel Aviv and the University of Munich before earning a PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1995.
Shalem specializes in the history of Islamic art, with a strong emphasis on Arab art in the Mediterranean Basin, the Near East, and the Levant, as well as in Spain, southern Italy, and Sicily. He also focuses on the art of the object, including secular and sacred aesthetics, as well as Jewish, Christian, and Islamic artistic interactions in the Mediterranean. He is no stranger to the Academy, with which he already collaborated.
“The Academy is very fortunate to have a scholar of Avinoam Shalem’s caliber providing a fresh and varied perspective as director,” said the AAR President and CEO Mark Robbins. “His academic achievements, intellectual generosity, and global approach to scholarship make him an ideal choice".

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Von Anna Foa*

Anlässlich des Tages des Gedenkens an die Opfer des Holocausts, am 27. Januar, hat Gabriele Nissim, Präsident von Gariwo, drei Vorschläge vor dem Ausschuss für Auswärtige Angelegenheiten der Abgeordnetenkammer unterbreitet. Die Vorschläge betreffen die Verhütung und die Bestrafung der Völkermorde und sind vom Ausschuss angenommen worden.
Die Verhütung und die Bekämpfung der Völkermorde waren die Grundlage des Gedankens von Raphael Lemkin. Er war ein polnischer Jude und ein Jurist, der 1939 in die USA floh. Lemkin war der erste, der von „Völkermord“ sprach. Der Ausgangspunkt seiner Überlegungen darüber waren die Ereignisse im nationalsozialistisch besetzten Europa, als er im Jahr 1944 schrieb. Es handelt sich um die Vernichtung der Juden. Es handelt sich um die Shoah, wie sie viele Jahre später genannt wurde. Lemkin beschränkte sich nicht darauf, das Zerstörungsphänomen anhand des von ihm erfundenen Wort „Völkermord“ zu beschreiben. Nämlich zog er die Lehren daraus und wurde dazu gebracht, seine Dynamik zu untersuchen und es zu behindern, zu bekämpfen, zu verhüten, gegen alle, die es wieder fortsetzten. Darüber hinaus hatte er die Gelegenheit, das Phänomen als Berater des Chefanklägers Jackson zu den Nürnberger Prozessen eingehend zu analysieren.

*Historikerin

Übersetzung von Sara Facelli, Studentin der Hochschule für Dolmetscher und Übersetzer der Universität von Trieste und Praktikantin bei der Zeitungsredaktion der Union der jüdischen Gemeinden von Italien.

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By Simone Somekh*

In 2012, Messauda Fadlun received a letter from the Italian government asking her to return all the money she had been receiving as part of a restitution program for those racially persecuted by the fascist regime during World War II. Fadlun, an Italian-Libyan Jew, and her family were shocked.“ We thought there had been a mistake,” said Ariel Finzi, Fadlun’s son, who is the rabbi of Naples. “Worst case, we presumed the government would stop paying for the pension, but not that we would have to return the money”.They were wrong: It was just the beginning of a long legal fight with the Italian government, which claimed she had not been eligible to receive the pension, despite granting it earlier. Fadlun died in 2018, and now her 98-year-old husband, Alberto Finzi, is expected to pay the sum of 76,000 euros (about $92,000).
 
*This article was originally published on JTA on February 2, 2021.

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