THANKS
Centro Primo Levi thanks its readers, audience and contributors as well as its main supporters: the Cahnman Foundation, the Viterbi Family Foundation, Peter S. Kalikow and Dr. Claude Ghez. The new logo of CPL is designed by Jonathan Wajskol.
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FEBRUARY 28 THE JEWS OF SANNICANDRO
JCC of Manhattan | 334 Amsterdam Avenue Read
Author John A. Davis, Emiliana Pasca Noether Professor of Modern Italian History at the University of Connecticut, tells the little known story of a community of Italian Catholic peasants who converted to Judaism in the 1930's with the approval of the Italian rabbinical authorities and emigrated to the new State of Israel, where a community still exists today. The book draws intriguing links between this astonishing affair and the wider transformation of 20th century Europe.
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FROM THE PRESS CONVERTITO
Adam Kirsch, The New Republic The story that John Davis tells in this book falls under the category of "truth is stranger than fiction." Who would believe, outside of a fable or maybe a joke, that in Fascist Italy a group of several dozen Catholic peasants would spontaneously decide to convert to Judaism; that they would persist in calling themselves Jews even as Italy introduced Nazi-style anti-Semitic laws; that they would make contact with Jewish soldiers from Palestine, serving in the British Army that invaded southern Italy during World War II; and that finally, after two decades of dedication and hardship, they would undergo ritual circumcision and emigrate en masse to the newly created state of Israel? Yet it all really happened in the town of San Nicandro in the impoverished, isolated Gargano region of southern Italy. Read |
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FROM J-ITALY APULIA
Apulian Jewry as Metaphor for Mediterranean Jewry
Fabrizio Lelli
The history of Judaism in Puglia is a distillation of thousands of stories of Mediterranean Judaism - fragments that across the millennia collectively comprise a powerful identity. Here are stories of wandering, of links sustained across great distances by faith in ancient traditions; and stories of commercial and cultural exchange across the length and breadth of this Mare Nostrum, where Jews have always played a mediating role. The first known deportation - one of a long series of exiles that brought the Jews to Italy - dates back to the forced migration from Jerusalem following the Roman destruction of the Second Temple, about 70 CE. Read
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MUSIC AN ARCHIVE IN BARLETTA
Pianist Francesco Lotoro presents 4,000 works from his archive of music from the concentration camps.
Francesco Lotoro, the Italian pianist and musical director, recently introduced KZ MUSIK - the Encyclopedia of Concentrationary Music - this January in Rome. This memorable achievement, which consists of 22 CD's and a book, is the result 24 years of Lotoro's painstaking research. It brings to light and puts in context over 4000 compositions written between 1933 and 1945 by musicians of various nationalities and religious backgrounds who were interned in concentration camps.
Mr.Lotoro collected music scores from institutions located on five continents and brought them back to life in this impressive series of recordings, following a historical map of internment and extermination camps.
The encyclopedia features a wide range of musical compositions, ranging from operatic and symphonic works, chamber music, piano music, lieder and chorales, cabaret, jazz, religious hymns, popular and traditional music, to unfinished works and works that were pieced together after the war.
While the entire body of recorded works is now available to libraries and to the public, Mr. Lotoro and his partners are in the process of completing the digitization of each of the musical compositions.
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STUDIES MUSIC
Music from Concentration Camps: 1933-1945
Guido Fackler, Music & Politics Journal
It would be wrong to reduce the "Music of the Shoah" (Holocaust/ churbn) to the Yiddish songs from the ghetto camps of Eastern Europe or to the multiple activities in the realm of classical or Jewish music found in the ghetto camp at Theresienstadt (Terez�n), which of course enjoyed a special status as a model camp. It would be equally wrong to restrict our view of music in concentration camps to the"Moorsoldatenlied"("The Peat Bog Soldiers"), the "Buchenwald Song," the "Dachau Song," or the so-called "Girls' Orchestra in Auschwitz," described by Fania F�nelon - also the subject of the Hollywood film entitled "Playing for Time".[1] Instead of this, I wish to address the topic of musical activities in general in the concentration camps.[2] Thus this chapter is about those camps that the Nazi regime started to erect just a few weeks after Hitler's assumption of power; these camps formed the seed from which the entire system of Nazi camps grew, and which eventually consisted of over 10,000 camps of various kinds.[3] Read
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