Italy is experiencing a sharp upsurge in Jews making aliyah. An estimated 300 Italian Jews are expected to move to Israel in 2014, the Italo-Israeli demographer Sergio Della Pergola told the Italian news agency ANSA on Friday. The Jewish Agency affirmed to JTA that the figure — more than double from a year ago —…
Getty Images The world’s oldest ghetto is about to get a makeover. Jewish-German designer Diane von Furstenberg is launching a $12 million initiative to restore the 500-year-old Venice Ghetto, i24 News reports. Von Furstenberg is spearheading the project, which would include rebuilding the neighborhood’s various synagogues, with real estate investor Joseph Sitt and other philanthropists…
I’ve loved train travel ever since I was a small child. For the summer trips we made from Moscow to visit Tuapse, a town on the shore of the Black Sea where my grandparents lived, I shared a four-berth compartment with my parents. We would eat boiled eggs, tomatoes and cucumbers we had packed, discuss…
Brief film clips from 1923 made public this month are believed to be the earliest video images of Italian Jews and among the oldest home movies produced in Italy. The nine minutes of film were screened in Rome Oct. 5 after being restored and digitized by Italy’s Central Institute for the Restoration and Conservation of…
Vittorio Dan Segre, an Italian-Israeli diplomat, a writer and political figure, has died. Segre, a committed Zionist who was also one of the grand old men of contemporary Italian Jewry, died in Turin on Saturday. He was 92. Born near Turin in 1922, he fled to Palestine in 1938 after Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini…
After years of delays city authorities may drop the idea of establishing a modern, $30 million Holocaust Museum in central Rome and instead install a smaller exhibit in a former shopping center in a Rome suburb. Plans were announced a decade ago to build a state-of-the-art Shoah Museum on the grounds of Villa Torlonia, wartime…
Italian police are investigating a widespread spate of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel graffiti in Rome that local media speculate could be the joint work of leftist and right-wing extremists. Dozens of swastikas, slogans and posters were found spray-painted or plastered on walls and shop windows Monday in various parts of the city – as many as…
Opposition parties in Hungary are protesting the nomination of a figure described as a far-right activist and anti-Semite as the country’s new ambassador to Italy. The Parliament’s Committee for European Affairs accepted the nomination by Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s rightist government of Péter Szentmihályi Szabó, but he still must face a hearing in the Committee…
