Having trouble viewing this email? Click here November 1, 2021 – 26 Cheshvan 5782

A third important chapter opens in the life of the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah in Ferrara: the exhibition “Beyond the Ghetto. Inside&Out” inaugurated on Thursday. Curated by Andreina Contessa, Simonetta Della Seta, Carlotta Ferrara degli Uberti and Sharon Reichel and set up by Studio GTRF Giovanni Tortelli Roberto Frassoni, it traces the history of Italian Jews from their confinement in ghettos (with the first established in Venice in 1516) to the beginning of the 20th century.
“What is being inaugurated”, explains MEIS President Dario Disegni, “is the third fundamental exhibit conceived by the MEIS, dedicated to the millennia of Jewish experience in Italy. This follows on the heels of the exhibit in December 2017 “Jews, an Italian story. The First Thousand Years” curated by Anna Foa, Daniele Jalla and Giancarlo Lacerenza — with objects on loan from the world's most prestigious museums, archaeological but not only — and the 2019 exhibit entitled “The Renaissance Speaks Hebrew” curated by Giulio Busi and Silvana Greco, which featured works by Mantegna and Carpaccio. Two very successful temporary exhibits, now condensed into the permanent collection “Jews, an Italian story”, which will be further enriched at the end of “Beyond the ghetto. Inside&Out”. This journey in time has been made possible thanks to the museums, private collections and family heirlooms lent to the Museum year after year and which, when displayed together, recount more than two thousand years of history.
“For centuries – writes MEIS Director Amedeo Spagnoletto - the Italian ghetto, an enclosure within which the Jews suffered a long, tortuous segregation, represented a narrow, shadowy space, albeit always fitted with symbolic windows that only rarely afforded any access to the outside world”.
“The ghetto functioned as a cultural and physical filter that molded every facet of Jewish life, deeply affecting the social and domestic spheres, modeling the lexicon and rendering certain aspects of religious life more resistant than elsewhere, but also suffocating the energy that under conditions of liberty would have blossomed more vigorously in myriad fields. This exhibition describes the complex interpretations that can be given to this experience. It covers not only the delicate relations between the Jewish communities and the local government, but also family stories, anecdotes and regional traditions, as well as the cultural and artistic activities that, despite everything, still managed to flourish within such a restricted dimension”.

Above from left, the MEIS President Dario Disegni and the MEIS director Rabbi Amedeo Spagnoletto with Sharon Reichel, Carlotta Ferrara degli Uberti and Simonetta Della Seta, curators with Andreina Contessa of the exhibition “Beyond the Ghetto. Inside & Out” at the opening ceremony (Photo by Bruno Leggieri).

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By Dario Franceschini*

Beyond the Ghetto. Inside&Out is the evocative title of the third MEIS exhibition on Italian Judaism: an important piece of Italy’s history and, at the same time, a crucial theme that prompts us to tackle important questions, today more than ever. Based around the central theme of the Jewish identity in Italy, this modern exhibition guides us across the centuries, through the vicissitudes of the Italian Jewish experience, taking in both the dark chapters characterized by segregation, made real by the establishment of the ghettos (the first in Venice, in 1516, followed forty years later by Rome), and a number of significant positive turning points, such as the extension to Jews of all civil and political rights, with their immediate participation in the process of the Risorgimento and in the construction of a united Italy. Jewish culture is part of us; indeed, it constitutes an important, profound piece of Europe’s root.
In Italy, in particular, we are talking about an uninterrupted presence that stretches back twenty-one centuries, making it the most longstanding Jewish presence in the West. For this reason, it is incumbent upon us to renew our awareness of just how valuable and fertile the contribution by Italian Jewry to the cultural, religious, social and political history has been.
Italy, and Europe as a whole, are now becoming increasingly multicultural and multi-faith. In the face of the re-emergence of the poisonous seeds of fear of the other and of difference, intolerance, xenofobia and antisemitism, it seems urgent to promote culture as an antidote, and to forcefully affirm the value of diversity. The new exhibition confirms the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah’s ability to work in concert with all of the national museums in Italy and to be granted access to major works on loan from institutions both within and outside the country.

* Italian Minister for Cultural heritage and activities and for tourism 

Above, the Minister Dario Franceschini at the opening of the exhibition “Beyond the ghetto. Inside & out” at the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah in Ferrara.

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Research activities on the Holocaust, with specific attention to Italy; the reconstruction of the professional biography of teachers expelled by racist laws; the start of researches on prisoners victims of medical trials in concentration camps and on the biographies of collaborationist Italian doctors; creation of popular and scientific publications; promotion of educational events; organization of exhibitions to promote the cultural heritage of the institutions involved as the results of their collaboration.
These are some of the many areas in which a new framework agreement on Memory will operate, according to a document signed last week by La Sapienza University of Rome, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah, the Contemporary Jewish Documentation Center Foundation, the Shoah Museum Foundation, and the Jewish Community of Rome.
“Memory is a fundamental pillar for our university. Today we are celebrating a very important milestone”, remarked the Chancellor of La Sapienza Antonella Polimeni. For the university, the agreement is another step into a path that has been traced for some time, with dedicated educational courses and initiatives of a high symbolic value such as the honorary awards given in the past to the Holocaust survivors Sami Modiano and Liliana Segre. “Ours - in the words of Polimeni - is a commitment to knowledge, to resilience to all forms of racism, intolerance and discrimination”. A commitment that is very necessary in a complex period in which the pandemic proved to be “an absolute amplifier of inequalities”.
The agreement, according to UCEI President Noemi Di Segni, “hinges on the concept of responsibility for a coherent memory path to Memory for the largest university in Italy, recognized by the solemn adhesion of all the Jewish institutions present”.

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By Gadi Luzzatto Voghera*

Our country confronts itself with history in a somehow reticent way, especially when history does not follow a reassuring mainstream of widely-shared and lesser-problematic narration. The overwhelming effort met when discussing the idea of a museum on Fascist Italy, with all its debates and arguments about the location and the type of narration, is just one example of all, despite its having been set aside and crossed out of the agenda. Yes, I think the right word here is ‘reticence’.
It is extremely hard to accept the idea that our history is way different from the comfortable narration of the “good Italian”. It also includes moments when Italians have committed not-so-irreproachable actions. However, it is necessary to deal with such actions so as to understand our present in depth. There are endless examples which range from the massacres perpetrated by our troops in Libya and Ethiopia or wherever we have been in war, as war is never a neutral reality, nor it is a moral reality, to the people cast into the death ditches by both sides, where there would always be civilian casualties. 
     
*Director of CDEC Foundation

Translated by Gianluca Pace 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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Triennale Milano is devoting a long-awaited exhibition to Saul Steinberg (1914-1999). Curated by Italo Lupi and Marco Belpoliti in collaboration with Francesca Pellicciari, ‘Saul Steinberg. Milano New York’ is a tribute that Milan owes to this great artist, who dedicated so many of his sharply intelligent works to the city in which he resided during his formative years.
The exhibition is filled with drawings in pencil, pen, crayon; works made using rubber stamps and watercolors, paper masks, objects/sculptures, fabrics, and collages, documenting Steinberg’s intense and versatile artistic output. These works are complemented with documents and photographs which provide a closer understanding of the artist’s life. In addition, the setup shows a selection of original magazines and books including some of Steinberg’s most significant contributions, for instance, the famous covers for ‘’The New Yorker’’. Steinberg never forgot the years spent in Milan (from 1933 to 1941), where he gained a degree at the faculty of Architecture in the Royal Polytechnic, besides making important friendships with several leading figures in the lively cultural world of the city. Milan is also the place where his artistic career starts, thanks to his first contributions to satirical magazines such as Il Bertoldo and Settebello, in the 1930s, through which he gained his precocious fame as a cartoonist.

 *This article was originally published on Inexhbit on 20 October 2021.

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