Having trouble viewing this email? Click here October 3, 2022 - 8 Tishri 5783 
 

By Adam Smulevich

For weeks, in the summer of 2021, we talked about little else. Then, attention started fading while Afghanistan disappeared from the front pages and stopped making headlines. Yet the humanitarian crisis has not stopped for a moment and rather intensified. While Western public attention dropped and the Taliban repression increased, the challenge remains that of solidarity. As if we were still in that dramatic August in which, in the space of a few hours, the conquests of twenty years collapsed.
This is the path followed by the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities through the provision of two scholarships to as many Afghan students who, having fled their country of origin, will have the opportunity to rebuild their future in Italy. It is a project carried out in synergy with the Community of Sant’Egidio (both students arrived through humanitarian corridors) and with the international Jewish NGO HIAS which supports it financially. A. is one of these students. A former ministerial official, he fled with his wife. With them also his sister and her eight-year-old son. "Unfortunately - he said - she became a widow: her husband, disliked by the Taliban, was brutally tortured and killed". A. and his loved ones should have already emigrated last year. They were on one of the lists through which, in the days of the mass evacuation, thousands of Afghans managed to leave. But, while they were waiting to board, an attack sowed panic. In the turmoil that followed, their rights were not recognized and they had no choice but to go back.

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The 40th anniversary of the attack on the Great Synagogue of Rome is approaching, as Italian President Mattarella remembered in his message for Rosh Hashanah. “The Jewish New Year celebration represents a moment of reflection on the continuation of a path of maturation and progress, at the individual and collective level, on the basis of shared values. My thoughts turn to the fortieth anniversary, next October 9, of the attack on the synagogue in Rome “, he said. His thought went particularly to the memory of little Stefano Gaj Tachè, victim at the age of two of “hatred and intolerance”. Mattarella's hope is “that people will be able to persevere in building an increasingly harmonious and dialoguing coexistence between the different realities of the country that enrich it with their identities, in harmony with the highest values of our Constitution”. On October 9th, President Sergio Mattarella will attend the ceremony at the synagogue commemorating the attack of 9 October 1982.
 
Above, the piazza in front of the Great Synagogue of Rome dedicated to Stefano Gaj Taché, the two-year old killed in a terrorist attack that took place on October 9th 1982.

"My brother’s name was Stefano, Stefano Gaj Taché. He was barely 2 when, on October 9th 1982, he was killed by a group of terrorists while he and his family were leaving Sukkot’s party in the Great Synagogue of Rome. My name is Gadiel, and my brother Stefano was 2 years younger than me. Today, 29 years after that massacre happened, on which Italy put a lid of ambiguous and awkward silence, I decided to commit myself to preserve the memory of a child murdered in the heart of Rome".
It was October 2011 when Gadiel Gaj Taché, interviewed by Corriere della sera, made this statement. On a community and personal level, it was the beginning of a new phase in the processing of October 9th, the day of the Palestinian attack on the synagogue and the day he lost Stefano, his beloved little brother. The day on which he himself, seriously injured, risked not to survive. Today, approaching the 40th anniversary, Gadiel returns to speak. He does so in a very important book, “Il silenzio che urla” (“The screaming silence”) published by Giuntina. It is a difficult but necessary testimony, valuable pages for the community.
Gadiel retraces the facts and proposes a kaleidoscope of emotions, his emotions: the pain for a wound that will never heal, the choice of life, also in the name of Stefano, his unabated battle for a clear understanding of this matter. "To this day – he writes – there’s no hard evidence that there has been a deal between the Italian government and the Palestinian terrorism of those years. In my heart I feel it with certainty, but another part of me refuses to believe it".

Translation by Sofia Busatto, revised by Margherita Francese, 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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By Laura Mincer*
 
Mojsej Abramovyč Fišbejn (1946-2020) is considered among the most important Jewish Ukrainians poets. In 1970, as a dissident, he was forced to exile by the soviets and until 2003 he lived in Israel and Germany but continued to write almost exclusively in Ukrainian.
In 2003, he came back to Ukraine and took a passionate and active part in the Orange Revolution of the following year and Majdan Uprising. In that period, he wrote: “Ukraine was given from God, and it is chosen by God. And it will survive because God wants it to survive. I do not know why this knowledge was given to me, a Jew. But I know it. Amen”.
 
* Historian of Poland, University of Genoa

Last week, Italian general elections made news on the international press and Jewish media has been covering with special attention the success of right-winger Giorgia Meloni and the Brothers of Italy. The prospect of the right-wing government elicited many reactions and raised a few concerns. Italy’s Jewish community isn’t worried about new 'fascist' PM is the headline of The Jerusalem Post, which in an article by Zvika Klein quotes an undisclosed source within the Jewish community leader according to which Meloni’s election s “a lot less dramatic than what the world media or Israeli media portrays it to be”. “Meloni – writes Klein - has a relationship with the Jewish community and has been very positive toward Israel, one source said, adding: “The only problem may be with members of her party” who have been identified as fascists”.
Italian Jews worry and wait as Giorgia Meloni, far-right leader, prepares to take power, titles the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, exploring in an essay by Simone Somekh the reactions of Italian Jews. The prospect of the “most right-wing government since World War II, when Italy was Hitler’s staunchest ally in Europe”, remarks the author, “has unnerved many Italian Jews, even as several of their leaders appear to be taking a wait-and-see approach to Meloni’s leadership, refraining from making public statements about the results”. Somekh also remarks that the “party does boast some Jewish supporters and members”, among which the former spokesperson for the Jewish community of Rome and the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor Ester Mieli. 
Should Jews be afraid of Italy’s new firebrand prime minister? So The Jewish Chronicle, which in an article by Nicholas Farrell, the author of ‘Mussolini: A New Life’, examines the relation between the Italian Jewish community and Brothers of Italy party. Italian Jews, writes Farrell, “are naturally suspicious of its new leader, Giorgia Meloni, who is described as “far-right” — ergo fascist — by the global media and who won such a convincing victory in last Sunday’s general election”. However, he concludes, “Italian fascism’s antisemitism was absolute evil. But as unpalatable as she may be to some, it is difficult to cast Giorgia Meloni in the same mould”.

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