February 4 at 6:00 pm
Presented in collaboration with the Simon Wiesenthal Center  
Italian Cultural Institute, 686 Park Avenue, NYC
Reception to follow

Giorgio Sacerdoti (President, CDEC) Liliana Picciotto (CDEC)

On the 60th anniversary of the Center For Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Milan, we honor the exceptional work of the young Italian Jews who after the war were committed to understand the tragedy their community suffered. They began to retrace and disclose the workings of twenty years of the fascist dictatorship some of their fathers had embraced, others had fought, and that the Italian society at large was trying to forget. CDEC is today the leading research institution on the history of the persecution of the Jews in Italy and has expanded its archive to include Italian Jewish life since the emancipation of 1861-1870 and the Italian Zionist experience.  
 
In spite of a growing bibliography in English and a substantial historiography of Fascism, the Italian chapter of the Holocaust is still relatively unacknowledged. Although many American and Israeli scholars have successfully integrated the most recent research and primary sources in their work, some major research institutions in Holocaust studies are still reticent to incorporate it in their exhibitions and curricula.

Nowadays CDEC seeks to reach international audiences by making available sixty years of Holocaust research in Italy, dispelling missinterpretations of the persecution of Italian Jews, reflecting on the disintegration of civil liberties under fascism, on the politics of constructing of collective memory. Read

 

February 9 at 6:00 pm

NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marim�, 24 West 12th Street   

Reception to follow

 

Serena Di Nepi, University of Rome La Sapienza, Jewish Museum of Rome, Agnes Peresztegi, Commission for Art Recovery, Alex Karn, Colgate University, Natalia Indrimi, Centro Primo Levi, New York.

In early October 1943, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the German agency in charge of seizing Jewish books and art, sacked the Jewish community building in Rome and seized the Rabbinical College library and the Community library, the latter being one of the most comprehensive and precious pre-modern Jewish libraries in the world. In 1946, the Allies located the Rabbinical library near Frankfurt and facilitated its return to Rome in 1950. No trace was ever found of the second one.

Despite various investigations, the latest by the Anselmi Commission on the confiscation of Jewish assets in 1999-2001, its fate remains obscure. Over the years, hypotheses multiplied and at least one volume from the library emerged in the US. For the first time this panel will address  the study of the content and history of the library, as it emerges through the registers of Inquisition, censorship, community chronicles and other historical sources dating back to the 15th century. Experts will also analyze the history of the investigations and discuss future efforts to recover this priceless patrimony.  Read

 

Adachiara Zevi, Monumenti per Difetto, Donzelli 2013

The book will be presented by the author and Jean Louis Cohen (NYU) on February 10 at 6 pm at NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marim�.

The title of this publication announces a short history of monuments "by defect", but just what sort of defect are we speaking of? The lack of "monumentality", if we employ this term to speak of specific prerogatives generally attributed to monuments: uniqueness, staticity, hierarchy, persistence, hypertrophic dimension, symmetry, centrality, rhetoric, indifference to place, aulic materials, eloquence and the expropriation of emotions.

This history is partial and non-exhaustive; it is not a survey that numbers and classifies monuments and memorials according to sites, subjects or intended users: since the 1990s the pioneering research of the American historian James Young has been followed by a galaxy of publications of great documentary and scientific value.

This history is not impartial, but sectarian; it does not even consider in the same way all the artistic and architectural creations. It prefers sobriety to redundancy, aphasia to eloquence, subtraction to emphasis, modernity to anachronism, individual responsibility to delegation: to quote Todorov, "exemplary" to "literal form".

 

Published in occasion of the 70th anniversary of the massacre of the Fosse Ardeatine on 24 March 1944, this study wishes to restore attention to the Mausoleum commemorating this event, whose merits are so often ignored or undervalued by Romans themselves. Erected in memory of a brutal mass execution, a symbol of resistance against Nazi and Fascist oppression and the product of the first design competition of democratic Italy held in 1944, the Mausoleum wrote a new page in the lengthy history of monuments and memorials. For the first time it proposed not an object to be contemplated, but a path to be travelled, a physical and emotional retracing of the victims' last moments: the elements which compose the mausoleum, namely the natural caves, the architectural space of the sacrarium and the tortured wrought iron gates by the artist Mirko, are not final destinations, but instead stops along a continuous route.

 

This milestone, whose chorus of languages - figurative, abstract, informal, expressionist -revived the artistic and architectural debate interrupted by twenty years of Fascist obscurantism, was succeeded by three other exemplary cases of monuments "by defect".  Read 

 

Alessandro Portelli

Over the course of seventy years, national memory, historiography and the justice system have shown profound ambivalence towards any real assessment of the Fosse Ardeatine massacre.

 

Outside of the saga of Kappler's escape, Pribke's trial and the farce that followed his death, the massacre has catalyzed national sentiments that have more to do with the internal conflicts of Italian society than with the event itself and its victims.

 

Consequently, formal historical inquiry and an understanding of the interplay between what we can reasonably assume as fact, and what happens in the realm of memory - including imagined events and false memories - becomes central to any attempt to seek justice individually or collectively. Read