Italy’s Jewish leadership called for Sunday’s European Day of Jewish Culture to be dedicated to battling indifference and urged aid and welcome for refugees. This year marked the 16th edition of the European Day of Jewish Culture, a continent-wide Jewish culture and education festival that encompasses hundreds of events in more than 30 countries. Renzo…
(JTA) — Whenever Georges De Canino worries about the future of Italian Jewry, he looks at the bricks in the building across the street from his apartment in the center of this city’s old Jewish ghetto. A painter who sometimes stares at the stones for inspiration, De Canino claims that they originally came from the…
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Italian counterpart, Matteo Renzi, in Florence, and thanked him for his recent “historic” speech in Israel’s Knesset. The meeting Saturday night took place in Palazzo Vecchio, Florence’s City Hall, and focused on international concerns including Islamic terrorism and the Iran nuclear deal, and on bilateral agreements between Israel…
Italy as a country is nothing if not traditional. Many of its cobblestone streets existed long before the U.S. gave so much as a birth cry and the Italian Jewish community boasts roots that go back to the second century B.C.E. The Renaissance is almost a modern phenomenon in comparison. But Rabbi Barbara Aiello, an…
This year, Israel’s contribution to the World’s Fair is, more or less, breakfast cereal. The theme of the fair, which opens in Milan in May and runs for six months, is “Feeding the planet, energy for life.” Israel will be represented by a 39-by-230-foot living billboard of wheat, rice and corn. It is meant to…
Historian David Kertzer won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography detailing how Benito Mussolini’s secret relationship with Pope Pius XI influenced the Italian dictator’s persecution of his country’s Jews. Kertzer, a professor of anthropology and Italian studies at Brown University, was recognized in the biography-autobiography category for “The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of…
Italian President Sergio Mattarella, met the family of a two- year-old Jewish boy killed in the 1982 attack by Palestinian terrorists on the Great Synagogue of Rome. The meeting took place Wednesday afternoon in Quirinal Palace, the official residence of the president. Mattarella warmly welcomed the parents of Stefano Gaj Tache, Joseph and Daniela; the…
The Italian city of Trani celebrated the reopening of the medieval Scolanova Synagogue. The reopening on Monday following some seven months of restoration efforts took place during the Lech Lecha Jewish culture festival in southern Italy’s Apulia region. Built in the 13th century, the synagogue was confiscated by the Catholic Church a few decades later…
