Having trouble viewing this email? Click here March 21, 2022 – 18 Adar 5782

By Anastazja Buttitta*

Everyone I know here in Poland is trying to do something to help the Ukrainian population.
From the first day of invasion, NGOs, citizens and companies acted to help. On Facebook a support group for refugees was created and its members quickly grew to five hundred thousand. Everything is offered, from a bed to a job, means of transport, commodities, useful information and so on, everything
for free. While cities populate with new inhabitants, marketing strategies changed on the fly. At this point almost every website, from the bank to mobile network, has a section dedicated to Ukrainian refugees, help and services of all kinds.
The Jewish Community of Warsaw immediately took an official stance against Putin's invasion and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee offered meals to the exiles. It is estimated that Poland has already seen one million refugees from Ukraine crossing its territory in recent days.
Those who can host people feeling the war, and by looking at their everyday things, almost identical to ours, we really understand how close the war is to us and how their condition could become ours one day. Doing skincare with a mother who fled with her child from Kiev, leaving everything she had behind, becomes a moment of sharing, of short serenity and levity. The stories of nights spent in bunkers or sleeping in a car shock us.
I couldn't stay at home twiddling my thumbs, reading all those horror news online, I decided to offer one of my key skills to society: driving. My car was filled with 2500 sandwiches prepared by the volunteers of “Zupa na granicę”. It's a cooperative that has been active since last summer with the humanitarian crisis on the border with Belarus. As its name suggests, "Soups for the border" gets ready and sends food to refugees coming from the border. On the twelfth day of the Ukrainian invasion, I left Warsaw at dawn towards one of the furthest crossing places, Medyka, around 400km from the capital. In the outskirts of Przemyśl another group of volunteers were waiting for me, they were from the organisation “Społeczny Komitet w Przemyślu – Pomoc dla Ukrainy”. They unloaded my car and sorted all the sandwiches to the first reception centres, close to the border and the Przemyśl train station. In the latter alone, 10,000 sandwiches are distributed per day.
The volunteers of this local committee are exhausted, they haven't slept for days and are trying to provide a shelter, a meal and hygiene products for the first nights on Polish soil. Not only do they take care of refugees, but they also have been running an educational centre for teenagers with disabilities for years. The volunteers, exemplary organised and followed, offer me a hot dish and tea.
Przemyśl, being already a small treasure of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and an important Jewish centre, thanks to the beautiful buildings in eclectic style and art nouveau, is slowly trying to revive after decades of neglect. Eastern Poland has always been neglected.
The currently ruling national-conservative party started from here, it willingly got votes, fomenting the frustration and the complex of inferiority of the people with the help of the Catholic Church. Already past Lublin, continuing southeast, the atmosphere changed, it was no longer the bustling Poland full of pubs and shopping centres, but that of small villages overflown by helicopters and crossed by military convoys.
No one returns to Warsaw with an empty car and I head towards the crossing to offer a place to stay and a ride in the car to some Ukrainian families. The road from Przemyśl to Medyka, about 10 km long, offers already a bleak landscape, without trees, with the dismal road due to road works and garbage in the ditches. Once arrived at the place, I find myself in front of a small circle of Dante's hell. A chaotic mass of tents from NGOs, including Israel's Hatzala Lelo Gevulot, bonfires where anything is burned, journalists with cameras, mountains of used clothes and exhausted and terrified people, under one of those thick snows that don't take root.

*Art historian and former curator of the Umberto Nahon Museum of Italian Jewish Art in Jerusalem
 
From top, the reception of refugees at the Polish-Ukrainian border by volunteers of the Israeli NGO Hatzala Lelo Gevulot; the author Anastazja Buttitta; the station of Przemyśl where volunteers of the Jewish organization HIAS work.

Translated by Alice Pugliese and revised by Gianluca Pace, 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 – Pagine Ebraiche.

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By Adam Smulevich
 
"I wouldn't call him a 'modern Maccabee', as some have written, because I don't think it's something that really defines him or that he likes to identify with. However, it is exciting that Jewish figures can rise to the role of leaders today, gaining prominence even in countries where life has often been troubled in the past. Zelensky's is an inspiring and heart-warming story in the great drama of these weeks".
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Chitrik, the city's Ashkenazi chief rabbi and leader of the Alliance of Rabbis in Islamic Countries, answered from Istanbul. A network created in 2019, on the eve of major upheavals in the Middle East region, with the aim of providing support for every possible need (starting with Casherut and other basic religious services). A declared objective: to consolidate and strengthen a Jewish presence as much as possible, going beyond the Mediterranean basin, which has been positively "contaminated" by millennia of presence. From Alexandria to Dubai, from Casablanca to Baku, the network is extensive. And in action, the rabbi explained to Pagine Ebraiche, are "not only with the fine words of dialogue, which do not always bring results, but through concrete experience".
Dialogue is one of the key words these days. It is precisely Turkey, together with Israel, that has put itself forward as a candidate for a mediating role in the conflict between the Russians and the Ukrainians. An initial (unsuccessful) meeting was held in Antalya. Still in the background is the hypothesis, strongly advocated by Zelensky, of Jerusalem. Turkey and Israel therefore appear to be in competition from this point of view. In the meantime, however, after more than a decade of hostility, they have returned to extend their hand.
"The baggage of the past never disappears of its own accord, but we, our two peoples, our two countries, are choosing to embark on a journey of trust and respect," the words of Israel's President Herzog from Ankara, where he met Erdogan and tried to lay the foundations for a new beginning. "We must agree in advance that we will not agree on everything. This," Herzog added, "is the nature of a relationship with a past as rich as ours".

Twitter @asmulevichmoked
 
Translated by Gianluca Pace and revised by Alice Pugliese, 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 – Pagine Ebraiche.

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Over 400 synagogues are at risk because of the war unleashed by Russia in Ukraine. The evaluation comes from the Foundation for Jewish Heritage, a London based charity working internationally to ensure that important Jewish sites, monuments and places of cultural significance are preserved. While acknowledging that of course the safety of human life is paramount, historic buildings should also be carefully protected, reads a note. 
"All armed forces have an absolute responsibility to protect cultural property and places of worship which constitute the cultural or spiritual heritage of peoples are protected during war under the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, signed by more than 130 countries, and its two Protocols (1954 and 1999); the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions, and customary law, such as the 1907 Hague Regulations". "Intentional damage to buildings dedicated to religion can be a war crime, prosecutable at the International Criminal Court", points out the appeal.
Jewish heritage sites in Ukraine, remarks the Foundation, have special significance given that they are linked to Jewish communities that were decimated or annihilated in the Holocaust. "They stand as testimony to man’s potential for inhumanity with crucial lessons for today".
Working with the Center for Jewish Art at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Foundation mapped the historic synagogues of Europe. The list can be found here.

Above, the Synagogue Jakob Glanzer in Lviv, Ukraine.

By Alberto Cavaglion*

The tragic news from Ukraine sparked two memories. To bring them down from the attic of memory came the catalog of a beautiful exhibition of portraits by Carlo Levi promoted by the Giorgio Amendola Foundation in Turin, where Leone Ginzburg "with red hands" occupies a prominent space: "When I painted them, they were only the memory of the Russian ghettos, the last sign of a previous life, over the generations ". In the exhibition catalog (published by Rinnovamento, curated by Cesare Pianciola and Pino Mantovani), Filippo Benfante skillfully embroiders the reason for those red hands in portraying the Jew from Odessa. The images from Kyiv and Kharkiv pass on television, and with the eyes of Carlo Levi one can glimpse the infinite pain of thousands and thousands red hands.

*Historian

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By Adam Parker*

A stone’s throw from the Po River in the Emilia-Romagna region is a town that once boasted a sizable Jewish population. It was not unlike many such cities throughout the Italian peninsula which, after the 1492 expulsion of Jews from Spain, welcomed (or at least accommodated) immigrants fleeing persecution. Italy had small Jewish communities in many cities since the times of Ancient Rome, and these Jews managed to retain their ethnic identities and sustain their religious practices even as they became enmeshed in Italian society as a whole.
This balancing act between cultural preservation and assimilation became the hallmark of Italian Jews — and their burden. When their population grew exponentially at the turn of the 16th century, so did their challenges. Jews in Italy were second-class citizens or worse. They were segregated into closed ghettos, forbidden access to most lines of work, exploited financially and persecuted by religious and political leaders. Nevertheless, they found ways to persevere and, sometimes, thrive — at least until Mussolini’s regime and the onslaught of World War II.

*This article was originally published on The Post and Courier on March 12, 2022.

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