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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Images: Giovanni Palatucci, adjunct commissioner of Fiume (1938-1944). Documents of Palatucci's activity. Internees in the camp of Campagna.
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EVENTS HEROES, SAINTS & THE RIGHTEOUS: THE CASE OF GIOVANNI PALATUCCI April 2 | 6 pm | Casa Italiana Zerilli Marim� | 24 W 12 St. Admission is free. Seating is assigned on a first come, first serve basis Centro Primo Levi and Casa Italiana Zerilli Marim� present: Marco Coslovich (Historian, scholar of the memory of the deportation and the concentration camp of Dachau, author of Giovanni Palatucci: A Righteous Memory) and Mordecai Paldiel (former Director of the Institute for the Righteous Gentiles at Yad Vashem and professor of History of the Shoah at Stern College). Moderator: Alessandro Cassin (Centro Primo Levi). Read Of 498 Italians named Righteous Among Nations by Yad Vashem, none has been the object of such national and international interest as Giovanni Palatucci.
A police officer in Fiume between 1937 and 1945, he was arrested by the Nazis and deported to Dachau where he died. Since 1953, the city of Ramat Gan in Israel, followed by the Catholic Church, the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities, the Italian Police, and the ADL, have identified Palatucci as the savior of thousands of Jews. In 1990 Yad Vashem conferred him the title of Righteous Among Nations, which sparked the making of a popular hero as well as his beatification process. Who was Giovanni Palatucci? What documents are available to historians to reconstruct his life? Is there a scholarly field devoted to the study of rescue? What are the criteria that determine the category of "Righteous Gentile"? What are the documents and historical facts that led to the recognition of Giovanni Palatucci? How, if at all, does the Jewish notion of Hasidei Umoth Ha'olam (Just Among the Nations of the World, i.e. followers of the laws of Noah) intersect with that of Hero and Saint? Join us on April 2nd for a in depth discussion of these topics and and an analysis of the life and deeds of Giovanni Palatucci through documents that have not been used in any of his popular biographies. |
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PRINTED MATTER DELASEM, THE UNHAILED ORGANIZATION THAT SAVED THOUSANDS OF JEWISH REFUGEES
Alessandro Cassin interviews Donato Grosser From Hitler's raise to power in 1933 up to the early 1940's, Italy was one of the few countries that accepted - both officially and trough legal-loopholes - thousands of foreign Jews fleeing persecution in their countries. The survival of these refugees (the majority of whom was interned in camps or sent to force residency in small towns) would have been unimaginable without the help of Italian Jewish relief organizations. Following the Racial Laws of 1938, Mussolini's government disbanded COMASEBIT (Commission for the relief of Jews in Italy), an organization established in Milan consequent to the arrival of the first wave of refugees from Austria, Germany and Czechoslovakia. In late 1939, as Jewish refugees continued arriving, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities set up the Delegation for the Assistance of Jewish Emigrants (Delegazione per l'Assistenza degli Emigranti Ebrei) or DELASEM. The headquarters were moved from Milan to Genoa under the chairmanship of Lelio Vittorio Valobra. Funds came mainly through Paris, from international Jewish institutions such as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committeeand the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, as well as from the Italian Jewish Communities. Faced with apparently insurmountable difficulties, the people of DELASEM showed enormous courage and great effectiveness in providing, housing, and in many cases facilitating the illegal emigration of thousands of foreign Jews, effectively saving their lives. Read |
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PRINTED MATTER MEMORY BURIED: IN SEARCH OF MUSSOLINI'S CAMPS
Alessandro Cassin interviws Carlo Spartaco Capogreco
Carlo Spartaco Capogreco is a professor at the Universit� della Calabria and president of Fondazione Ferramonti, which is dedicated to preserving the memory of the largest Jewish internment camp in southern Italy. For the past 20 years, through detailed archival research, fieldwork, and extensive interviews with survivors, Prof. Capogreco has painstakingly reconstructed the realities of civil internment during the Fascist era. This has allowed him to reconstruct a comprehensive historical-geographical mapping of internment camps and other forms of confinement devised by Mussolini during 20 years of dictatorship.
Capogreco's first book on the subject, I campi del duce. L'internamento civile nell'Italia fascista (Torino: Einaudi, 2004), covers the period from 1940 through 1943. It will be followed by a forthcoming volume documenting the approximately 40 camps and detention centers in what became the Repubblica Sociale Italiana, which sent thousands of Jews to extermination camps in Nazi-occupied territories.
Focusing on little-known, complex, and often overlooked realities of Fascist internment in its different varieties, Capogreco dispels many myths about Mussolini's dictatorship. As early as 1925, the idea of segregating, confining, and interning political opponents was a key element of the regime's strategy. Read
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