Having trouble viewing this email? Click here October 18, 2021 – 12 Cheshvan 5782

The Italian Jewish community commemorated on Friday the 78th anniversary of the deportation of more than 1,000 Jews from Rome to the extermination camp at Auschwitz. The raid took place at dawn on 16 October 1943, when Roman Jews, including 207 children, were rounded up in the Ghetto and taken across the Tiber to the Collegio militare on via della Lungara. Two days later, they were deported to Auschwitz. Only 16 were to make it back alive, 15 men and a woman. Neither president Giorgia Meloni nor a delegation of the far-right Brothers of Italy (FdI), Parliament's main opposition party, participated in the solemn ceremony held in front of the Great Synagogue of Rome.
FdI, which is Italy's top party according to most recent opinion polls, decided not to attend after a “cordial phone call” with the president of Rome Jewish Community Ruth Dureghello. The prospect of its presence had sparked many resentments within the Roman and Italian Jewish world, and the protests forced them to reconsider the program. So Fdl in a note released before the ceremony: “With the president of the Jewish Community Ruth Dureghello we agreed to participate to the commemorations and the deposition of a wreath with a parliamentary delegation so to express in person the proximity and friendship of Brothers of Italy and European Conservatives. Unfortunately, we have been informed that in the Community not everybody agreed that we should bear this testimony just before the elections”. President Dureghello explained to the press that the decision to reschedule the meeting with Fdl was meant to avoid “misunderstanding” and “ambiguities”.
After the ceremony, a new interactive map was presented at the Museum of the Shoah Foundation. Titled “16 ottobre 1943. Geografia della deportazione” (16 October 1943. Geography of the deportation) and curated by Marco Caviglia, Isabella Insolvibile, and Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi, it allows navigating the city of Rome and to explore the sites in which the Nazi-fascist persecution took place: from the places of arrests to Nazi police commands to the steps of deportation.

Above, the ceremony in Rome commemorating the anniversary of the deportation.

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I-TAL-YA Books is the innovative project resulting from the collaboration between the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI), the National Central Library of Rome (BNCR) and the National Library of Israel (NLI) to create, for the first time ever, a unified catalog of all Jewish books in Italy. Made possible thanks to the support of the Rothschild Hanadiv Europe Foundation, it is aimed at cataloguing and making available to scholars from all over the world 35,000 printed books from 14 Jewish communities in Italy and 25 state institutions through a new groundbreaking database.
A first phase has just ended, with the cataloging of the first five thousand volumes, as the UCEI representative of the project Gloria Arbib recently explained presenting “I-TAL-YA Books” to the public of the Jewish Book Festival recently held in the town of Ferrara. Under the Sukkah of the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah (MEIS), the various partners recalled the importance and uniqueness of this ambitious initiative.
“It is a project that we have believed in since the first day; it is demanding and important: a project of restoration, cataloguing, valorization and worldwide sharing of an ancient Italian Jewish heritage whose value is immense”, remarked the UCEI President Noemi Di Segni.
“It is a heritage of Jewish knowledge that puts together the ancient Jewish traditions (knowledge and skills of academics) and the Italian printing art, which is unique in the world. We believe it is something important, a value that has to be shared”.

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Гади Полакко*

В стране, где светскость находится на дистанции от либеральной идеи, где права всех (включая неверующих) декларируются как гарантированные, постановление объединенных гражданских секций Кассационного суда кажется замечательным новшеством. Опубликованный вчера, он указывает на концепцию "разумного приспособления" как способ уравновесить присутствие распятия в школьных кабинетах с другими религиозными символами. Исходя из этого, предложенный курс действий вызывает нас радует, предвещая социальные "референдумы" на тему, следует ли демонстрировать священные реквизиты и какие именно. Именно так, классический и запутанный итальянский способ решения, но не слишком много.Короче говоря, религиозные символы..."по требованию". A иначе, почему бы и нет, телеголосование следует открыть.

* Перевод Джанлука Паче, студента Высшей школы современных языков для устных и письменных переводчиков Университета Триеста, практиканта/практикантки в редакции газеты Союза итальянских еврейских общин. Отредактировано Темирланом Баймаш и Алиханом Ибраевыи.

By Liora Finkel*

We have all been feeling the effects of the COVID-19 virus for over a year now. At this point, some people have celebrated two birthdays, anniversaries, and annual holidays under pandemic conditions. Simultaneously, as of May 8th, there have been more than three million deaths from COVID-19 worldwide. On February 20, 2020, Italy confirmed its first case of COVID-19, and the following day experienced the nation’s first death relating to the virus.
At the outset of the pandemic, Italy provided an example of a successful national lockdown and ways in which community members could feel less isolated without putting themselves in danger. The videos of Italians singing Verdi’s “Va’ pensiero” from their balconies created a boost of morale in ways unseen by most of the world in recent years.
Soon, other countries followed Italy's example, not only for keeping people safe and healthy but also for how to hold out hope for a pandemic-free future. In the year since Italy's first COVID-19 case and subsequent death, the country has exceeded 110,000 deaths due to the virus, but also has fully vaccinated approximately twenty percent of its population. The anniversary of COVID-19 has brought about the human necessity to remember deaths, specifically in both secular and religious contexts.
On the weekend of the first anniversary of the first Italian COVID-19 death, Italians held ceremonies - secular and religious - marking the important date. A tree was planted and a plaque was unveiled in the town of Vo Euganeo, the home of Adriano Trevisan, the first Italian to die from COVID-19. The plaque included a quote by poet Ugo Foscolo, reading, “A man never dies if there is someone who remembers him”. While the ceremony performed in Vo and across Italy isn’t Jewish, it bears similarity to the Jewish ritual of observing a yortzeit (the Yiddish word for the series of Jewish practices used to mark the annual anniversary of a person’s death).

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* 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.
 

By Frances D'Emilio*

An extreme-right party’s violent exploitation of anger over Italy’s coronavirus restrictions is forcing authorities to wrestle with the country’s fascist legacy and fueling fears there could be a replay of last week’s mobs trying to force their way to Parliament.
Starting Friday, anyone entering workplaces in Italy must have received at least one vaccine dose, or recovered from COVID-19 recently or tested negative within two days, using the country’s Green Pass to prove their status. Italians already use the pass to enter restaurants, theaters, gyms and other indoor entertainment, or to take long-distance buses, trains or domestic flights.
But 10,000 opponents of that government decree turned out in Rome’s vast Piazza del Popolo last Saturday in a protest that degenerated into alarming violence.
It’s the mixing and overlap of the extreme right and those against Italy’s vaccine mandates that are causing worries, even though those opposed to vaccines are still a distinct minority in a country where 80% of people 12 and older are fully vaccinated.

*This article was originally published on Associated Press on October 13, 2021.

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