CONGRESS FOR THE CENTENARY OF THE BIRTH OF MARCO MORTARA
Marco Mortara was born in Viadana on May 7th 1815. He attended high school in Mantua and then entered the boarding school of the Rabbinic College of Padua. After obtaining his degree in 1836, he began his office in Mantua. Born in the year of the Restoration, he enthusiastically welcomed the adhesion of Mantua to the Kingdom of Italy, which occurred following the third war of independence and celebrated with a solemn ceremony in the main temple, composing for the occasion a liturgical poem entitled “Hymn to God” for Vittorio Emanuele. The essential element of Mortara's thinking was that the emancipation acknowledged to Jews in the Kingdom of Italy involved a transition of Judaism from the original national-religious connotation to an exclusively religious one, with the consequent ability to integrate into Italian national life.
Literary Prize AURELIA JOSZ
Literary Prize Aurelia Josz: The female revolution in agriculture First Edition 2015
Tuesday 21st April – at 5 p.m. in Sala Appiani – Arena Civica Gianni Brera viale Byron 2, Milan, Award Ceremony.
Aurelia was born in 1869, daughter of a learned Jewish family, and graduated in Florence in Italian literature at the Regio Istituto superiore di Magistero femminile. In 1902 she founded the first female practical school of agriculture in the Della Stella Orphanage in Milan. In the first half of the thirties Aurelia set up, in just six months, another agricultural school in Sant'Alessio, in the province of Rome. The fascist government, who had given her the task, then excluded Josz, and entrusted the new institute to another more appreciated headmistress. After the approval of the racial laws by Fascism in 1938, Aurelia Josz refused to expatriate, and after September 8th 1943 she joined her sister in Alassio. Arrested in 1944, she was first deported to the concentration camp of Fossoli, then to the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she arrived, after a journey in the sealed wagons, on June 30th 1944. She was killed the day after.
TESTIMONIES OF JEWISH HISTORY BETWEEN MANTUA AND CREMONA
The series of meetings aim to enhance the material traces that narrate the ancient Jewish presence in the Cremona and Mantua area and to offer an overview of the ruins and places, deepening the knowledge of the urban centres that have hosted the communities since the 14th century. We will analyze the buildings, monuments, works of art, objects and discoveries still visible that document the culture and the Jewish history in our area.
The initiative is aimed at couriers and tourist guides, so that they can expand the offer of unusual routes capable of unveiling a little known historical and cultural wealth; at teachers, so that they can discover in the places an irreplaceable source of interest and knowledge for their students; at students, so that they can improve their ability to read and understand the cultural historical contexts and their complexity and at all citizens, because knowing the place where we live helps to share it, enhance it, conserve it, and preserve it.
Provincial Grape-Harvest Festival
This Sunday there will be a banquet with Israeli wines at the Grape-Harvest Festival of San Colombano al Lambro.
A wine festival where you will be able to learn, taste and appreciate wine produced with milleniary techniques and passions. And if after tasting the wines that you will enjoy, you will also have the opportunity to buy excellent Israeli Kosher wines.
SCIESOPOLI
When Fascism and Nazism ended, in September 1945 a delegation composed of Raffaele Cantoni (President of the Jewish Community of Milan), Moshe Zeiri and Teddy Beeri (of the Sappers "Solel Boneh" of the British Army) obtained from the CLN of Milan the colony " Sciesopoli " for Jewish children who had been orphaned, survivors of the Shoah, who escaped its extermination. In Selvino they found "a long-dreamed of paradise, a fairytale castle and they hardly realized they were free, and reborn". The people of Selvino received them with generosity and brought their smile back. Those children, brought back to life, between 1945 and 1948, with the help of the Jewish Community and the Municipality of Milan, the soldiers of the Jewish Brigade, the former partisans and many others, left clandestinely for Mandatory Palestine where a new future, the State of Israel, was being built. About 800 "children of Selvino" found in "Sciesopoli" a new meaning to their lives. The old colony, a masterpiece of the rationalist architecture of the architect Vietti-Violi, is today unusable, completely abandoned. Sciesopoli in Selvino was one of the fundamental places of the Bricha affair (the escape) and of the matter of Alyah Beth, one of the most significant refugee camps set up in Italy for Jewish Displaced Persons. Our goal is to save its memory.
