Having trouble viewing this email? Click here February 15, 2021 - 3 Adar 5781

By Pagine Ebraiche staff

On the tragedy of migrants left in the cold at the Lipa camp in northwest Bosnia, it is necessary to break the wall of indifference and act in a coordinated way to change the status quo. It is the request promoted by the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, which in this regard has already interested the leading institutions of European Judaism.
As UCEI Councilman David Menasci emphasized: "In these days in the center of Europe, in the middle of winter, a group of people, refugees, are abandoned in inhuman conditions in the indifference of the main governments and a large part of the population. Seeing images of people in prison conditions, in the cold and without the possibility of having a minimum of hygienic conditions, with scarcity of food available, shakes our conscience because it recalls images of the agony of our loved ones during the atrocities to which they were subjected in the extermination camps. Atrocities that we would never want to see again”.
ousted.

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“I deem the published and subsequently removed post very grave and unacceptable. We distance ourselves from it.” That is Italian Minister for Foreign Affairs Luigi Di Maio’s comment on the incident concerning Turin’s Councilwoman Monica Amore, a member of the Five Star Movement, who posted on her social media a picture containing squalid antisemitic cartoons: all the publications from press group Gedi depicted in a single block, surrounded by some caricatures typical of the twentieth-century antisemitic propaganda. The picture Amore used was first diffused on the negationist Telegram channel Libera Espressione (Free expression), allegedly.
The President of the local Jewish Community Dario Disegni was the first to point out the incompatibility of the Councilwoman’s public role with intemperance as such. “Those are cartoons from the antisemitic, Nazi-Fascist propaganda”, he said. The Councilwoman would be “unworthily filling a post in public institutions.” If she cannot understand it, Disegni added, “then the Movement which nominated and elected her should.”

Translated by Silvia Bozzo and revised by Antonella Losavio, 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.

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By David Meghnagi*

A unique combination of psychological, stylistic and formal elements resulted from Primo Levi's scientific education, with his plain language, his "marble" prose – far from "the language of the heart" – and the moral tension of his writings. He thereby gave body to one of the most significant works about the experience in concentration camps ever written.
During his lifetime, Levi was appreciated for his moderate optimism. He wanted to understand, rather than blame. An opposite reading prevailed after his death by suicide. The first reading of Levi's message drew attention to its positive and vital aspects, to the measured optimism which transpired in articles and interviews. What was firmly denied in the first place, appeared in a different light after his death. The image of an "optimistic" writer was replaced by a more tragic view that was strengthened by the pages of his last work. Actually, in order to understand that things were more complex, it should have been enough to read between the lines and in the interstices between one book and another, in poems and in the openings and endings of his works of testimony and invention.

*Psychoanalyst
 
Translated by Antonella Losavio and revised by Silvia Bozzo, 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. 
 

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The Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea-CDEC of Milan recently published the 17th issue of “Quest. Issues in Jewish Contemporary History”, its online journal. It is a monographic issue dedicated to the idea of Europe as seen by that vast cultural world that used to express itself in Yiddish. As the curator Marion Aptroot recalls in her introduction titled “Thinking Europe in Yiddish”, “On the eve of the Second World War, there were, roughly, eleven million speakers of Yiddish in the world. That may not seem a large number to speakers of German or English, but it was, at the time, more than the number of speakers of all the Scandinavian languages combined”.
As the director of CDEC Gadi Luzzatto Voghera points out, “We are talking about an important cultural reality, physically exterminated before the idea of ​​the political construction of a European space could materialize. However, it is a reality that today's Europe cannot fail to deal with. This necessity prompted the authors of the essays ­­­­published in Quest to search – from different perspectives the traces of the representations that Europe made of the multiform figures that animated Yiddish culture in the first half of the twentieth century, with incursions also into the previous century”.

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El presidente de la Conferencia Episcopal Italiana condenó el antisemitismo luego de que un evento virtual en memoria del fallecido líder judío Amos Luzzatto fuera interrumpido por imágenes y lemas de odio contra la comunidad hebrea. “Al condenar firmemente este nuevo acto de odio, la Iglesia que está en Italia reitera la necesidad de trabajar juntos –con todas las confesiones cristianas y los creyentes de otras religiones– para favorecer una cultura del encuentro y de la amistad”, escribió el Cardenal Gualtiero Bassetti en una carta fechada el 10 de febrero, luego del ataque virtual. El incidente ocurrió durante el homenaje a Luzzatto, ensayista italiano y expresidente de la Comunidad Judía de Venecia, fallecido en septiembre a los 92 años. 
 
*Este articulo fue publicado en Aciprensa el 13 de febrero 2021.

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