Having trouble viewing this email? Click here May 1, 2023 – 10 Iyar 5783

"If you want to go on pilgrimage to the place where our Constitution was born, go to the mountains where partisans fell, to the prisons where they were imprisoned, to the camps where they were hanged”. This is the appeal launched by Italian President Sergio Mattarella in celebrating Italy’s Liberation Day during a ceremony in Cuneo, citing one of the Fundamental Charter's founding fathers, anti-Fascist intellectual and politician Piero Calamandrei. On 25 April he sent a strong message to the country stressing the importance of keeping alive the memory of the past.
"Wherever an Italian died to redeem freedom and dignity: go there, o young people, with your thoughts, because there our Constitution was born," said the Head of State using words originally addressed to students in Milan in 1955. 
25 April 1945, as the UCEI President Noemi Di Segni remarked in commemorating the anniversary in Milan,“was the feast of regained freedom, of the possibility of moving freely, of breathing in the sunlight, of thinking that the fascists had disappeared forever”. “We are well aware of how this day of celebration was politically framed in the first decades of the post-war period and how today the challenge is to overcome any division concerning historical events and the reasons that must inspire the celebration of such deeply identifying values”. However, she continued, “in today's political context - the imperative is awareness” against any form of nostalgia and intolerance.
From Milan to Naples, many initiatives took place in Italy to celebrate the Jewish contribution to the Resistance and Liberation. In Verona, the memory of the Trieste partisan Rita Rosani, killed on Monte Comun and awarded the gold medal for military valor, was honored in a ceremony at the synagogue. A plaque was placed on the building commemorating her commitment to defending the "highest ideals of humanity". In Trieste, civil and religious authorities took part in a ceremony in the concentration camp Risiera di San Sabba with the laying of a wreath near the building meant for eliminating Jews, and civilian and military prisoners. In closing, the concert by the Trieste partisan choir Pinko Tomažič.

From top, the banner of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities at the commemorative event in Milan; a tribute to the Jewish Brigade in Livorno; the ceremony at the Risiera di San Sabba in Trieste (Photo Montenero).

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The Bet HaKnesset, the house of assembly, and the Bet Chaim, the house of life. The synagogue and the cemetery. They are profoundly different and distant places, which apparently share only being a fundamental part of the cycle of Jewish life. Yet, on a closer look, the interweaving of these symbolic spaces tells the complexity of Jewish history over the centuries, as highlighted by the new exhibition of the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah - MEIS, "Case di vita. Sinagoghe e cimiteri in Italia" (Houses of life - Synagogues and cemeteries in Italy). 
Curated by Andrea Morpurgo and the director of Meis Amedeo Spagnoletto, the exhibition – which opened last week and can be visited until 17 September – conveys the religious, social, and cultural significance of both Bet HaKnesset and Bet Chaim. Covering over two centuries of history, the exposition offers projects, designs, documents and objects, architectural features, rituals and social features of both synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in Italy.
"On show is an innovative, original, and in-depth analysis of the synagogue and the Jewish cemetery, two symbolic spaces that, throughout the itinerary, are told from an architectural as well as a ritual and social point of view", remarked the President of MEIS Dario Disegni at the opening ceremony. 
All mayor rituals and lifecycle events of a Jew, from birth to death, take place in synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, but the exhibition is not only a journey into a Jewish life. "It is also an opportunity to discover unexpected details of Italian cities: if in the era of the ghettos the synagogues had to be hidden from the outside world, acting as anonymous ‘caskets’ of extraordinary and precious objects used inside their halls, after the Jewish Emancipation and the Unification of Italy, the Jews wanted to actively participate in urban life and influence the urban land­scape as well, building monumental temples".

Above, Moise del Conte, The Old Synagogue Leghorn (Livorno), 1791, Watercolour drawing, Leghorn (Livorno) Jewish Community.

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Among the most extraordinary pieces showcased at Case di vita. Synagogues and Cemeteries in Italy, there are a late 15th century mahazor (prayer book) from the Emilia Romagna area, shown for the first time; the Vercelli Holy Ark or chamber for the scrolls of the Torah made in Piedmont in the 17^th century, at the time of the ghettos; the designs for the big architectural competitions for the new monumental synagogues in the centre of the main Italian cities after the unification of the country, the most famous being the Turin Mole Antonelliana originally built as a Jewish temple. And the list could go on. 
Materials come from city archives, Jewish Communities, and families, benefiting from precious loans and documents from the State Archives and Jewish Communities, to expose a fascinating story of cities and human beings. In this perspective, Italian cities come to a new light revealing places of still hidden beauty and a lesser-known history, such as that of Jewish cemeteries. 
Their evolution, which is complex and troubled, is key to understand the relationship between Italian Jewry and public power in the various periods of time. From the ancient Jewish catacombs in Rome and Venosa, to the fields or ortacci (the bad vegetable gardens) outside the city walls in the Middle Ages: Jewish rites always intrigued society, so much so that in 1720 Alessandro Magnasco, one of the main exponents of the fantastic and grotesque style, painted a Jewish Funeral currently displayed in the Musée d’art et d’historie du Judaïsme now permanently at the Louvre, that granted the loan for the exhibition.

Above, Florentine Carver, Model of the Jewish Temple Florence, c. 1880, Carved wood (Jewish Museum, Florence’s Jewish Community).

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Approaching Jewish architecture, especially regarding symbolic places such as synagogues and cemeteries, requires confronting the delicate fabric of identity. From this premise, Andrea Morpurgo, the curator with rabbi Amedeo Spagnoletto of Houses of Life - Synagogues and Cemeteries in Italy, analyzes the evolution of Jewish public spaces in Italy in an essay published in the exhibition's catalog, which we publish here an excerpt.
 
By Andrea Morpurgo
 
A community’s cultural identity is normally either anthropological or collec­tive: the former is basically personal dimension, the latter evolves with the socio-political events of a given group, with reference to a shared historical memory, whose image often depends on representative monuments and build­ings (Ascherson 2007). Studying the meaning of identitarian relations that en­sue between architecture and its place, requires understanding the factors that contributed to the definition of their presence, the transformations and their possible destruction or abandonment.
In other words, how architecture and its linguistic and typological codes have translated the identity of the context, its cultural and ideological orientation: this will tell us a lot about the identity of a community, in time and space (Coppola Pignatelli 1992).
Given these premises, an understanding of Jewish architecture – synagogues and cemeteries – necessarily entails dealing with their identity spaces where forms and styles cannot be merely credited to promoters and designers. Jew­ish architecture is the result of a complex collective processes triggered to mirror facets of the community’s identity, translated into space, throughout time and places inhabited, and not just to address functional needs. 

Above, Konstantin Von Guise da Hieronymus Hess, Inside of a Roman Synagogue, Printed in Karlsruhe by J. Velten, post 1830 (Jewish Museum of Rome).

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The president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, Noemi Di Segni, participated in the ceremonies for the liberation of Italy from fascism in Milan on Tuesday, noting its importance for the Jewish community. Speaking about Liberation Day in Italy, she told the Corriere de la Sera newspaper: “On that day in 1945 it meant being able to go out on the streets, look at the sun, breathe without being afraid of having to hide in order not to be killed, captured, deported. On the 24th all of this was still possible. Within a few hours everything changed: for the Jews, for the partisans, for every Italian. And it’s impressive to think about it,” according to an English translation provided by the European Jewish Congress.
 
*This article was originally published on Israel National News on April 26, 2023.

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