Having trouble viewing this email? Click here September 12, 2022 – 16 Elul 5782 

This year Ferrara will be the leading city for Italy for the European Days of Jewish Culture, which will take place next Sunday. More than a hundred Italian locations, all across the country, will participate by opening to the general public synagogues, museums Jewish sites, conferences, concerts, performances, guided tours, and other activities. In Ferrara, the event will start on Saturday night in the streets of the old ghetto and will continue the entire next day. The program was unveiled last week by the president of the Jewish Community Fortunato Arbib, Rabbi Luciano Caro, and City Councilor for Culture Marco Gulinelli. On the same evening, it will be possible to take guided tours of the former ghetto, illustrative totems will be placed for the occasion. The following day, Sunday 18 September, in via Mazzini 95, at the Italian Temple, the official and national inauguration will take place at 10:30 am, in the presence of national and local authorities.
Immediately afterward, a conference on the theme of renewal will follow with speakers Rabbi Luciano Caro ("The renewal in Jewish law"), Giulio Busi of the Freie Universität Berlin ("The coexistence of tradition and innovation in the Jewish contribution to European culture"), Giulio Disegni, jurist and UCEI Vice-president ("The renewal of legal relations between Jews and surrounding society over the centuries"), Laura Graziani, scholar, archivist and historian (who will start from the Ferrara example of the 1570 earthquake to talk about the reopening of the community and the renewal of relations with the city, also connecting to the most recent events of 2012), and Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, Director of CDEC Foundation (“The renewal of Jewish communities after the war and the Shoah”).

Above, from left Rabbi Luciano Caro, the president of the Jewish Community Fortunato Arbib, and Ferrara City Councilor for Culture Marco Gulinelli.

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“Memory is the ability to acknowledge things, to treasure them, to educate, and to go beyond. But to do that, it is necessary to plant strong pickets. And that of today, seems to me the strongest”. So Italian Minister of Education Patrizio Bianchi last week at the opening of an extraordinary day of testimony: the return to the classroom of eight Jewish students expelled or excluded from school by the promulgation of racist laws. It was September 5th, 1938. Exactly 84 years later, the eight testimonies made their entrance into a classroom of Rondine Cittadella della pace (province of Arezzo) to sit along with 31 students that chose to attend the fourth year of high school at this center of excellence in education for dialogue. Another ex-student, Senator for Life and Holocaust survivor Liliana Segre, who shared the same discrimination, joined the event remotely. 
 The occasion is a strong signal, Minister Bianchi pointed out, “also to those that, in the world, are now let off and forgotten”. And this thanks “to whom was once excluded and is now a bearer of inclusion”. The theme was explored by the testimonies themselves, welcomed by Franco Vaccari, the founder and president of Rondine, an organization committed to reducing armed conflicts around the world and spreading its method for the creative transformation of conflicts, and President of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities Noemi Di Segni, in a dialogue hosted by Repubblica deputy editor Francesco Bei. 

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The new Israeli Ambassador Alon Bar, in Rome last week, is ready for his mission in Italy. In the coming weeks he will officially present his credentials to the Head of State Sergio Mattarella. In the meantime, he met with the chief ambassador of the Italian diplomatic protocol Inigo Lambertini, to whom he presented a copy of the credentials signed by the President of Israel Isaac Herzog (pictured). “Mazal tov”, was the message of Lambertini, who at the end of August warmly greeted Bar's predecessor, Dror Eydar. "In three years – Lambertini remarked - he has learned Italian in an excellent way and has been a real builder of relations between our two countries". The mission of Bar, for a long time the head of the political-strategic establishment of the Foreign Ministry, starts in this wake.
A longtime diplomat, Bar has closely followed several delicate issues for Jerusalem. A more recent example is his mission, last May 9, to Turkey to meet with his counterpart in Ankara and prepare - as the journalist Barak Ravid said - the visit to Israel of Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu. The mission was completed in late May.

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“Nothing was ever the same again”. A sentence you could hear very often when - the last year on March 19^th, with the speech of President Macron and of the highest officials of the République – France stopped to commemorate the 10^th anniversary of the attack on the Toulouse Jewish school. Four victims fell under the blows of Islamic fanaticism - Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his children Gabriel and Aryeh, and the little Myriam Monsonégo. Processing those events is yet an open and tearing matter. How to cope with such a trauma? How to look at the present? And, most of all, what kind of future to imagine for yourself and for your loved ones? These are daily issues on the agenda of French Jews and of their institutions, which in the years that followed the attack have been repeatedly hit by an increasingly resurgent anti-Semitic hatred that targeted communities as well as individuals (even the ones in particularly vulnerable conditions, e.g., violating domestic intimacy). Eloquent are the stories, for which much has been mobilised in Italy as well, of two elderly women who have been murdered- Sarah Halimi and Mirelle Knoll. There’s a courageous book, that’s been published just before the anniversary, which can help us: “Toulouse, 19 mars 2012, L’attentat de l’école Ozar Hatorah par ceux qui l’ont vécu”. The author is Jonathan Chétrit, ex-student of the Jewish school in Toulouse. He was 17, the day on which his life changed forever. “Right after the attack – he explains - I started thinking about what I had experienced, trying to express my emotions and my feelings. As we all know, our memory is not infallible and it is also because of this that I felt the need to put down on paper a few points. I wrote not to forget and it’s been therapeutic.” Some other survivors spoke out as well. A choral testimony in which “every voice count, in which every story complements the others”.
 
Translation by Margherita Francese, revised by Martina Bandini, students at the Secondary School of Modern Languages 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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Von Anna Foa*

In Sesto San Giovanni haben die Wähler die Wahl zwischen dem Sohn eines Überlebenden der Shoah und der Tochter eines jener Anhänger der Italienischen Sozialrepublik, die einem Regime, das die Juden jagte und deportierte, treu ergeben waren. Beide sind Politiker, allerdings nicht in dieser Rolle als Nachkommen von Deportierten oder Salò-Soldaten, sondern als solche. Und als solche verkündet. Natürlich hört Fiano nicht auf, auf seine jüdische Identität ebenso wie auf seinen außergewöhnlichen Vater stolz zu sein.
Aber nicht einmal hat Rauti diese Abstammung von einem Salò-Protagonisten, der später ein rechtsextremer Ideologe war, jemals verleugnet. Diese Möglichkeit der Wahlentscheidung - wen soll man ins Parlament schicken, die Nachkommen der Opfer oder die Anhänger eines Regimes, das sie verraten und ermordet hat? - sorgt für Unruhe. Aber ist dies nicht die Republik, die aus dem Widerstand, aus dem Bewusstsein der Shoah, aus dem "Niemals wieder" geboren wurde? Die Republik, die sich auf eine Verfassungscharta gegründet ist, die die Neugründung der aufgelösten faschistischen Partei in jeder Form ablehnt?

* Historikerin
 
Übersetzt von Martina Bandini, Schülerin der Hochschule für moderne Sprachen für Dolmetscher und Übersetzer der Universität von Triest, Praktikantin in der Redaktion der Vereinigung der Italienischen Jüdischen Gemeinschaften – Pagine Ebraiche.
 

By Shiryn Ghermezian*

Italy’s governing body of soccer the Italian Football Federation, also known as Federcalcio, announced on Monday that it will investigate antisemitic chanting from fans of the Italian soccer teams Juventus and Inter Milan at separate matches over the weekend, AFP reported. The Italian Football Federation did not respond to a request for comment.
A video posted on Twitter shows a group of Inter Milan fans chanting “the champions of Italy are Jews” just before kick-off of their game against A.C. Milan on Saturday. A.C. Milan published the video on its official Twitter account and wrote in English in the caption “such a shame.” AFP added that violence also broke out between supporters of the rival teams during the game.
 
*This article was originally published on The Algemeiner on September 5, 2022. 

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