Having trouble viewing this email? Click here April 4, 2022 – 3 Nissan 5782

By Adam Smulevich
 
Over the past few days, Rabbi Paolo Sciunnach and Rabbi Ariel Finzi, already members of the Italian Rabbinical College with the title of Maskil, have achieved a goal that was celebrated with great enthusiasm in Italian Jewry: the major rabbinic title. To obtain it, they took an exam which ranged on different subjects. Among the others, Tanakh, Talmud, and Halakhah. Both passed the exam brilliantly. Current teacher at the Jewish school in Milan, Rav Sciunnach presented a paper on the kavanah, "the intention of the heart, joy, awareness and passion" to fulfill a precept. On his part Rav Ariel Finzi, who has been Rabbi of Naples since 2015, exposed the position of the Halakhah, the Jewish law, about the modern figure of the spy who works to defend Israel's security.
The goal achieved by Rabbi Sciunnach and Rabbi Ariel Finzi marks an important starting point. "The idea is to make a contribution to Italian Judaism, not excluding the hypothesis of carrying out the role of rabbi of a community", remarks Rav Sciunnach. "It is the culmination of a long course of study. The Community has always given me exceptional support, making me want to finish", explains Rav Finzi. The candidates were examined by a commission composed of five rabbis: Rav Alfonso Arbib, Rav Riccardo Di Segni, Rav Alberto Moshe Somekh, Rav Ariel Di Porto, and Rav Yakov Simantov.

Above, Rabbi Paolo Sciunnach and Rabbi Ariel Finzi with President of the Italian Rabbinical Assembly Alfonso Arbib at the end of the exam to obtain the major rabbinic title.

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The history of the music of Italian Jews is a rich and complex one. Every Jewish community in Italy, be it large or small, maintained its own musical tradition up to the early 1900s. It is an extremely diversified heritage that survives in very diverse formats and different levels of preservation spanning communities that have completely disappeared and whose music is to be found only in a few transcriptions and individual tunes to communities where the liturgical tradition is still very much alive, vibrant.
Protecting this legacy, favoring its use, and sharing it is the challenge of the Online Thesaurus of Jewish Italian Music, a database offering systematic access to recordings, transcriptions and scores also valuing archives and resources already present.
A balance of the first year of activity of the project, promoted by the International Center Leo Levi with the support of prestigious Israeli, American and Italian institutions, was recently illustrated in Florence at the presence of rabbis, cantors, and scholars. The meeting was also an opportunity to remember Leo Levi (1912-1982), the extraordinary protagonist of Italian Jewry to whom this initiative is dedicated.
An Italian ethnomusicologist, he was the first to study the oral musical tradition of Italian Jews. A grandson of a rabbi, his attempt to submit a PhD thesis at the University of Turin was thwarted by the onset of fascism and he emigrated to Palestine in 1936. He returned to Italy after World War II and dedicated himself to the study of Italian-Jewish music. "It is moving to think of him and his rescue work carried out with a small tape recorder, from synagogue to synagogue", remarked David Meghnagi, Vice-president of Leo Levi Center. The Thesaurus comes from this commitment. Its goal is to offer scholars, musicians, laymen, community members and anybody with an interest in Jewish music, a comprehensive online database of the music of Italian Jews. It also aims to raise a new generation of chazanim.

Above, Leo Levi at the Italian synagogue in Jerusalem.

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A new website by the Museum of the Shoah Foundation in Rome was launched last week. Titled www.studiarelashoah.it, it is aimed at teachers and students of first and second grade secondary schools and illustrates "the historical roots and evolution of the anti-Jewish persecution in Italy". Presented at the Sala della Protomoteca in Campidoglio in the presence of UCEI School and Work councilor Claudia Pratelli and President of the Shoah Museum Foundation Mario Venezia, the website is the result of the work of historians Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi, Isabella Insolvibile and Marco Caviglia, with the support of Roma Capitale.
This initiative, it was remarked, renews a commitment "to carry forward historical memory, with an eye to young people". To reach them, explained Venezia, the site "provides contents necessary to work in classrooms and stimulate curiosity and desire to learn more". There are five main thematic sections, each of which declined in different chapters, accompanied by texts, images, thematic maps and links to multimedia contents with a biographical analysis on persecutors, victims, political figures.
It is a narrative path that "connects places, events, testimonies and documents, History and Memory".

Above, the presentation of the project in Rome (Ph. Micol Funaro)

By Anna Foa*

From the letter in which the writer Jonathan Littell invites his Russian friends to overthrow the tyrant: " You are very numerous, you are millions. The Moscow police can handle thirty thousand people in the street, a hundred thousand. More than three hundred thousand, they would be overwhelmed. They would have to call in the army, but would this army fight for Putin, when it came down to it? […]
There will be terrible danger, of course. […] In Syria, and now in Ukraine, Putin sought to show you, by example, what happens to a people who dare […] not only to ask for freedom but actually to try and take it. Yet if you do nothing, so many will be lost anyhow. And you know it. One of your sons will make a joke on a video game chat, and will be arrested; one of your daughters will express her indignation on internet and will be arrested; a dear friend of yours will make a mistake and will die in a dank cell under the sticks of the police. This is what has been happening for years now, and is what will continue to happen, on a greater and greater scale. […] Now is the time for your own Maidan".

*Historian

By Judith Sudilovsky*

Almost exactly 255 years ago, on the 10th day of the Jewish month of Adar I in the year 1767, 14-year-old Luna bat Yehuda Ambron finished her task and put down her quill.
She had completed scribing the whole Scroll of Esther with its accompanying blessing scroll. As had become common practice in those days, with the advent of the printing press and books, she also wrote an inscription in tiny script below the liturgical text at the bottom of the parchment.
"With the help of G-d, the writing of these blessings with the scroll was completed on 10th Adar I 1767... [by] the modest and pleasant girl Luna, daughter of the honorable and wealthy Yehuda Ambron, in the 14th year of her life... May we merit to see miracles and wonders speedily in our times," she wrote, forming the letters of her name just a little bit bigger than the rest.

*This article was originally published on The Jerusalem Post on March 8, 2022.

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