Having trouble viewing this email? Click here May 3, 2021 - 21 Iyar 5781

“Remembering is pain, but I never shirked. Even illuminating a single consciousness is worth the effort and the pain of keeping alive the memory of what it was. For me, memory is living and writing is breathing”. So the Hungarian-born but Italian by adoption Holocaust survivor writer and poet Edith Bruck, who just turned 90, in a recent interview stressed her commitment to a life of witness, writing, poetry.
Bruck’s tireless dedication, pursued through extraordinary books, was honored by the Italian President Sergio Mattarella bestowing on her the honor of Knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. It is a symbolic thanks on behalf of the whole country. "When I learned of this honor - said Edith - I cried". Edith Bruck, who as a young girl survived Auschwitz and other extermination camps, was received at the Quirinale last week. On February 20, she made the news for receiving a visit from Pope Francis in her Rome home. Her last book, Il pane perduto (The lost bread), recently was nominated to the Strega, the most prestigious Italian literary award.

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By Daniel Reichel

For three and a half years Fabien Azoulay has been trying to resist the daily violence he suffers in Turkish prisons. He still has 13 years to serve. In his letters to family and friends he declares that he does not know how long he can resist and be able to tolerate other prisoners’ abuse. He - as a homosexual French Jew - represents a perfect target for other prisoners, especially for Islamic fundamentalists. Because of his identity, he said, a cellmate inflicted severe burns on him. His family's lawyers warned the President of the French Republic Emmanuel Macron: “Fabien is desperate and his life is in danger”. In France, in the past few days, a real/full-fledged campaign has started to bring Azoulay back home. The City of Paris recently joined the cause by means of a motion, which passed unanimously.
An online petition has been signed by over 100,000 French people, including several figures from the transalpine Jewish world. People responsible for the petition were contacted by Pagine Ebraiche and explained that something is starting to change.

Translated by Antonella Losavio 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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“Armenian Memory cannot leave us indifferent”. So the president of the Italian Rabbinical Assembly Rabbi Alfonso Arbib on the recent anniversary of the Metz Yeghern, “The Great Evil Crime”, as the genocide of the Armenians, carried by the Ottoman Empire during World War I, is known. That massacre is still an open wound in Europe’s conscience and an uncomfortable memory for Turkey, which still denies those bereavement and suffering. However, we must remember, pointed out Rabbi Arbib in a note. “The Armenian genocide, whose memory is fundamental and precious, requires a commitment from all of us with firmness and clarity”. “Any Memory – he added – is always specific and inherent to particular facts, processes and contexts that need to be known, assumed, understood, and efforts must be made in order to dispel the risk of undue generalizations so that universal moral and political lesson could be drawn”.

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By  Alberto Cavaglion*

Geel is a Flemish city, isolated for centuries and ignored by history. From the perspective of the history of mental illnesses and their cures, it has a particularly unique history. Right from medieval times, the mentally ill from all over Europe went there to beg for healing.  The secular France will begin a process of radical transformation, with the intervention of the institutions and the control of specialist doctors. They tried to show the world that the mentally ill were not dangerous, nor contagious. They could live among the “sane”, go back to work and eventually to their families of origin. Throughout the nineteenth century, when scientific study of the meanders of the subconscious began, alienist, psychologists and anthropologist will look at Geel as a laboratory of modernity.
One of our major scholars of positivism and of the work of Cesare Lombroso, Renzo Villa, after decades of archival research, gifts us with a volume of great scientific importance, but also of deep human sensibility: Geel, la città dei matti. L’affidamento famigliare dei malati mentali: sette secoli di storia (Geel, the city of the mad. Seven centuries of history of family custody for the mentally ill) published by Carocci. 

*Historian
 
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, interns at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities.

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By Joanne Palmer*

“Ghetto Songs” perhaps is not the most intuitively appealing of album titles. It might make potential listeners think that it would be grimly earnest, with songs of despair, pain, mourning, inexorable doom. Those listeners would be right in theory, in that their assumptions would be logical, given where our minds go when we think about ghettoes, but in reality they’d be wrong. First, the songs are hard to classify as music. They share a provenance in that they all come from a ghetto, but that says far less than you’d think. A ghetto is not a ghetto is not necessarily a ghetto.
“Ghetto Songs” is a Frank London project, which makes it by definition hard to categorize. Mr. London, the trumpeter and composer who’s been active in the Jewish and broader musical world for decades, at least since the Klezmatics, the American neo-Klezmer band that he leads, started making its joyful, mournful, funny, plaintive, wildly varied but always (sometimes clearly, sometimes inexplicably, but when you hear it you know) Jewish music in the 1980s. He’s probably worked with more styles than there are labels to describe them.
 
*This article was originally published on Jewish Standard on April 28, 2021.
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