Having trouble viewing this email? Click here August 16, 2021 – 8 Elul 5781

The history and culture of the Jews of Italy are largely unknown to most Americans, as they are to most Italians. Even among well-educated American Jews, it’s news that Italy is home to a multi-millennial Jewish history, its own minhag, and many consequential Jewish thinkers, writers, artists, and historical figures. If anything, there is a vague awareness that there is an old ghetto in Venice, and it’s a cool place to visit between pizza and gelato. 
I teach Italian language, literature and culture at Muhlenberg College, a small, highly selective liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, USA, with a substantial number of Jewish students (roughly one-third of the student body). We are lucky to have strong Jewish Studies and Italian Studies programs, and several years ago I created an advanced-level course entitled “Jewish Italy” in order to bring together students from these two fields. 
Together we read, analyze and discuss texts created by Italian Jews from the Middle Ages to the present day, with the latter half of the class dedicated to the great Jewish-Ialian figures of the 20th century: Svevo, Saba, Levi (Primo and Carlo), Ginzburg, Bassani, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Modigliani, et al. We examine synagogue and ghetto architecture, the musical traditions of Italian liturgy, artwork, the various foodways of Italian Jewry, among other things.  Of equal importance is our attention to the present-day experience of contemporary Jewish Italians and the continued development of the Jewish communities of Italy. 
The highlight of the course, however, is our collaboration with Pagine Ebraiche International. This collaboration began with a previous iteration of the course when then-editor Rossella Tercatin and I devised a semester-long assignment for the students to write an article about a Jewish-Italian community that would be published in Pagine Ebraiche International.
The idea was to give the readers of PE International a take on Jewish-Italian history from the viewpoint of young American students. This past semester, with covid raging and the college running most courses online, we joined forces again, and, with the invaluable contributions of editor Daniela Gross, who visited our class through Zoom, this year’s students each selected a Jewish-Italian topic of interest to them, researched it, and wrote feature articles which will be published in these pages over the coming months. 
Through numerous drafts and revisions, the students developed a nuanced understanding of the great richness, diversity and vitality of Jewish experience, life, and culture in Italy. Topics range from the recuperation of early modern Jewish-Italian music to the U.S.-based marketing of Italy as a destination for Jewish weddings.  All of the articles present an examination of a facet of Jewish-Italian experience from the point of view of American college students studying Jewish and Italian culture and history. We are thankful to Daniela Gross for her openness to collaboration and the time and effort she has generously dedicated to the project. And we are grateful for the opportunity to engage with a readership as interested in Jewish Italy as we are.  We hope that Pagine Ebraiche International readers will enjoy our pieces.
 
*Assistant Professor of Italian and Director of the Muhlenberg College Italian Studies Program, Allentown, PA, US.

By Kyle Tassone*

What is “illumination”? In addition to being a synonym for “light”, Illumination, is also a unique project that gathered passionate professional musicians under the guiding vision and direction of cellist Ayela Seidelman, to rediscover early modern Jewish-Italian liturgical music. In this convocation of musical minds, the project was formed, and with it, the uncovering and rebirth of some of Italy’s most intriguing early modern Jewish musical pieces, which the group performed live, and then recorded and released digitally in May of 2020. 
Leading up to the project’s creation, Seidelman conducted an in-depth study of music in search of long and nearly forgotten songs from Italian synagogue archives in hopes of finding pieces of Jewish-Italian origin that she could resurrect and reintroduce to modern ears.
This was not the first time that Seidelman undertook an endeavor of this kind. While studying cello at institutions such as the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, and the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, Seidelman gained a great deal of experience reconstructing little-known musical pieces, taking first prize in a musical contest where musicians from all over the world performed pieces originally written by composers who had died during the Holocaust. While attending school, she also minored in Religious Studies, gaining theoretical and practical knowledge that would inform her approach to projects such as Illumination.

Here the premiere performance of Illumination-Jewish Italian Spiritual Music, a unique international cooperation which sheds light onto the mesmerizing and largely unknown musical legacy of Italian Jewry.
  
*This piece is part of a series of articles written by students of Muhlenberg College (Pennsylvania, USA) enrolled in a course on the history and culture of Jewish Italy, taught by Dr. Daniel Leisawitz, Assistant Professor of Italian and Director of the Muhlenberg College Italian Studies Program.

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“On August 12, seventy-seven years ago, the SS soldiers carried out a massacre of defenseless civilians in the hamlets of Stazzema, which was one of the most horrifying of the entire war. Hundreds and hundreds were killed. Children murdered together with their mothers and grandparents. Stazzema was considered a refuge for the weakest, for the displaced. Instead, it became a bloody land, the scene of atrocious cruelty and of ferocious contempt for human life, up to the outrage of burning of victims in the square of Sant'Anna”.
With these words the President Sergio Mattarella commemorated last week the Nazi massacre of Sant’Anna di Stazzema in Tuscany, on its 77th anniversary. It was one the most heinous acts perpetrated in Italy during World War II. On 12 August 1944 the SS, with the help of the Brigate nere, murdered about 560 villagers and refugees, including more than a hundred children, and burned their bodies. In the early 2000s, the crimes have been defined as voluntary and organized act of terrorism by the military court in La Spezia highest Italian court of appeal. Among the witnesses of that horror, there was the 29-year-old Rabbi Elio Toaff z.l., future Chief Rabbi of Rome, who fought in the ranks of the Resistance.

Above, the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella lays a laurel wreath at the memorial stone, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the awarding of the gold medal for military valor to the Municipality of Stazzema (Photo Quirinale).

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By David Meghnagi*

Memory is a dynamic process in which data are continuously remodeled on the basis of what is learnt afterwards. A testimony given immediately or soon after a traumatic event reflects the experience of the moment. Who speaks years later, does so also in light of what they have learnt since, reconstructing a cognitive unity which might not have been there at the time the event took place. Processing the past does not happen in a void. It is the result of a constant interaction with the outside world and the inside world, in an attempt to make sense of the past and imagine a possible future. It is necessary to distinguish between the individual memory of an event and its collective memory. The first belongs to personal history. It is made of personal experiences which may either be repressed or painfully thought over and revised within a process that does never happen in a void. With collective memory, wider processes on a social, cultural and political level are at play. Learning how these two aspects interact with each other is a great challenge for scholars. The dialectic among memory, testimony and research is complex: they are different fields strictly connected and taking strength off each other. 

**Psychoanalyst

Translated by Silvia Bozzo and revised by Antonella Losavio, students at the Advanced School for Interpreters and Translators of the University of Trieste, interns at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities.

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It’s Andrea Santucci, a firefighter and former councillor for the League party in the town of Colleferro, near Rome, has caused outrage by proposing naming a Rome square after Adolf Hitler. Santucci said he was in favour of renaming Rome's Piazzale dei Partigiani (Square of the Partisans) after the Nazi dictator.
“The proposal to name Piazzale dei Partigiani after Adolf Hitler is unacceptable and shameful,” said Rome Mayor Virginia Raggi via Twitter. “Rome is a proudly anti-Fascist city. We will never permit such madness”. Italian Partisans Association ANPI said Santucci should be prosecuted. “Those words are despicable and I fear that the person who said them does not even feel shame,” Fabrizio De Sanctis, ANPI's chief in the province of Rome, told ANSA. “I don't think it is the midsummer heat but the arrival of the election campaign (for local elections) that brings out these fascists. “It is intolerable. He must be charged with apology of Fascism”.
 
*This article originally appeared on Ansa on August 13, 2021.

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