Category: Focus

Focus

Jews in Modena in the period between Italian Unification and the Fin de Siècle: Society, Urban Space, and Identity

ABSTRACT This article examines the transformation of the Jewish community of Modena from emancipation to the early twentieth century, focusing on the shifting relationship between civic integration, communal continuity, and the redefinition of Jewish identity. Bringing together economic, political, social, demographic, and urban perspectives, it explores how Modena’s Jews participated in the civic and economic transformation of the post-Unification city, while confronting the enduring legacies of segregation and the less visible forms of prejudice that accompanied formal equality. Particular attention is paid to the construction and subsequent transformation of the synagogue and the former ghetto, as well as to legal controversies and the emergence of Zionist mobilization at the turn of the century. The article suggests that emancipation should not be understood as a linear transition from segregation to integration, or from distinctiveness to assimilation, but rather as an ongoing process of negotiation between different forms of belonging. The history of Modena thus illuminates the complex ways in which Italian Jews participated in the making of the modern city while rearticulating communal ties, Jewish identity, and collective responsibility within a changing national and European context.

issue 29 / n.1 (2026) by Federica Di Padova

Home Making: Caregivers in Post-Holocaust Children’s Homes in England, France and Germany

ABSTRACT After the liberation of the camps the vast numbers of orphaned and refugee children emerged from camps, hiding places, forests where they had somehow managed to survive against all odds and under miserable circumstances, taking aid workers by surprise. Of the estimated 175,000 Jewish children who survived the Holocaust, a few thousand found their way to Jewish children’s homes scattered throughout Europe.
Recently, a wealth of scholarship has drawn attention to rescue operations like the Kindertransport as well as child survivors of the Holocaust. By drawing on child survivor stories told in their own voices, they give them agency and bring them from the silent margins to the center of Holocaust and post-Holocaust history. Some of these scholars have discussed post-Holocaust children’s homes, but most studies have focused on a single home or national setting.
Using personal testimonies, memoirs and other primary sources focusing the lives of caregivers and their work in a few homes in England, France, and Germany in the immediate post-Holocaust period, this article identifies practices that aided child survivors’ recovery from traumatic experiences. By considering these homes together, similarities and differences in caregiving practices are identified, suggesting that exceptional caregivers made vital contributions to reestablishing Jewish identities and communities after the Holocaust.

issue 29 / n.1 (2026) by Andrea Wuerth

A Jewish Memory or an Italian Memory? The Narration of the Colonial Past by Members of the Livornese Community in Tunisia

ABSTRACT This study analyzes how the Italian-Jewish community in Tunisia, known as the “Livornese community,” has reconstructed its collective memory and its common historical path. The minority, composed of Sephardic Jews who settled in Tunisia between the 17th and 18th centuries, maintained a distinct identity from local Jews and other European groups. They were influential in the colonial milieu but occupied a complex position due to the intersection between their religion and their Italian nationality. The decolonization process (1943-1970), triggered a mass emigration from the country, but also conflicting narratives about the community past. This research explores how these narratives have been created and transmitted through autobiographies and interviews, highlighting the interplay between national, religious, and political identities. The Livornese Jews’ unique social position and plural affiliations produced a multifaceted memory, influenced by the emigration trajectories and the broader process of assimilation of formers Europeans colonizers.

issue 29 / n.1 (2026) by Martino Oppizzi

East or West? Musrara neighbourhood and the dynamics of Mizrahi-Palestinian-Ashkenazi relations

ABSTRACT This article aims to analyze the history of the Musrara neighborhood in Jerusalem from its foundation to the period following the Six Day war, adopting the perspective of urban microhistory. Using Musrara as a lens of analysis makes it possible to highlight how the constant reconfiguration of Jerusalem’s urban space reflects not only the social, political, and cultural dynamics of the region, but also the specific ways in which these processes acquired distinctive meanings within the boundaries of the neighborhood itself. Through oral history and direct testimonies, this article retraces the lives of Musrara’s new Mizrahim residents against the backdrop of ethnic and socioeconomic discrimination and the Arab Israeli conflict, while also examining the development of a political consciousness among them.
Musrara was a Palestinian bourgeois neighborhood until 1948, a frontier zone of a marginalized Mizrahi subproletariat between 1948 and 1967, a theatre of war and social conflict, and eventually a concrete and symbolic hinge between East and West following the Six Day War. The transformation of urban space thus sheds light on the interaction between national conflict and the ethno-social question—two crucial aspects for a more analytically comprehensive historical reconstruction of Israel and Palestine, the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, and the different degrees of subalternity produced by social hierarchies and nationalism.

issue 29 / n.1 (2026) by Michael Hazan

“Holocaust Vietnam 1979”: Boat People and Analogical Uses of Catholic Memory of the Shoah (1978-1980)

ABSTRACT This article examines the analogical use of Holocaust memory within Italian mass Catholic culture during the Indochinese refugee crisis (1978-1980), at the beginning of John Paul II’s pontificate. The study aims to reconstruct the origins and functioning of the parallels established between the Jewish genocide and the exodus of the boat people, analyzing how the Italian Catholic press reworked the traumas of the past to interpret the present. The theoretical framework adopted is Michael Rothberg’s concept of the “multidirectional memory.” The research investigates the use of symbols associated with Nazi extermination camps, reinterpreted through the lens of Christian tradition. It identifies three levels of comparison: the analogy between the persecuting regime and Nazism, the parallel between refugees and Jews, and the comparison between the silence of Western powers in the past and in the present. Through the analysis of covers, cartoons, photomontages, and articles authored, the analysis demonstrates that these rhetorical and visual strategies were not driven solely by humanitarian or apolitical aims. Rather, they enabled Italian Catholics to reinterpret their relationship with the past in redemptive and identity-building terms, overcoming historical guilt and reinforcing the “myth of the good Italian.” At the same time, the mobilization against indifference and the rhetoric of “never again” functioned as effective instruments of self-legitimation, aimed at reaffirming the role of the Church as a moral and spiritual guide.

issue 29 / n.1 (2026) by Daniele Passeggi

The Foundational Groundwork of the CDEC: A Jewish Youth Documentation Initiative in a National and Transnational Context

ABSTRACT This article explores the early development of foundational groundwork that led to the establishment of the Contemporary Jewish Documentation Center (CDEC) from 1952, when the project first emerged, to its first Statute in 1957, via its official foundation on 25 April 1955. It examines its symbolic and structural foundations, its guiding models, and the strategic choices that enabled a youth-led initiative to overcome significant challenges within the postwar and early Cold War context. The analysis situates the CDEC within the milieu of its founders, a group of young members of the Italian Jewish Youth Federation, providing insight into the challenges and debates at the heart of postwar Jewish reconciliation in Italy. It also explores the generational tensions experienced by those who had grown up under Fascism and sought a renewed civic and political identity through postwar engagement. Furthermore, it draws a close connection between the Centers foundations and the efforts to document and interpret the memory of the persecution affecting groups targeted by Fascism and Nazism, particularly that of the Istituto per la storia del movimento di liberazione in Italia (Institute for the History off the Liberation Movement in Italy). Finally, the CDEC’s documentary mission is contextualized within a transnational framework of Jewish historical commissions and documentation centers across Europe, the United States, and Israel, setting the standards to preserve, analyze, and disseminate the memory and history of the Shoah.

issue 28 / no. 2 (2025) by Sara Buda

“If not us, who?” The CDEC and the German Investigations into the Deportation of Jews from Italy: The Bosshammer Case (1963-1967)

ABSTRACT This article reconstructs the investigation into the deportation of Jews from Italy launched by the Dortmund prosecutor’s office in 1964, highlighting the roles played by the CDEC Foundation and Eloisa Ravenna in particular. Drawing on the correspondence between Ravenna and the German prosecutors, it shows how the organization of the Milan hearings of May 1967—which involved nearly fifty witnesses—was largely entrusted to the CDEC, effectively making it the investigation’s operational hub.

This article then examines the testimonies collected during these hearings, comparing the Italian transcripts produced in 1974 with the original recordings, which were rediscovered in 2022. This comparison shows that while the transcripts present linear and coherent accounts, the recordings reveal a more complex process shaped by translation, hesitation, interaction, and the crucial role of interpreters.

issue 28 / no. 2 (2025) by Laura Brazzo

“Better Than Schools Teach It, More Accurately Than Our Fathers Tell It”: The Educational Commitment of the CDEC, 1955-2005

ABSTRACT This article describes the dynamics that led the CDEC to engage with schools and to define its educational program during its first 50 years of activity. In its early phase, this took the form of self-education among young members of the Federazione Giovani Ebrei Italiani (FGEI; Jewish Youth Federation of Italy) within the Resistance and an antifascist paradigm. From the 1970s onward, its contribution to education on the memory of deportation and the Resistance developed from a perspective that diverged from that of the Istituti storici per la Resistenza (Institutes for the History of the Resistance). With the publication of deportees’ testimonies and survivors’ visits to schools, however, a unified view of the struggle for Liberation and of the victims of Nazism-Fascism persisted. In the late 1980s, historical research began to challenge these approaches. In the 1990s, amid renewed scholarly work on deportation and in response to a new wave of antisemitism and denialism, the CDEC began to devote itself to educational work in a more structured way. With the transition from the First to the Second Republic, attention to the Resistance declined. The paradigm shift was marked by the establishment of Holocaust Remembrance Day. Pedagogical reflection identified Auschwitz as an anthropological watershed. Subsequently, two developments defined new educational challenges: the establishment of museums and memorials in Italy and widespread access to the internet.

issue 28 / no. 2 (2025) by Patrizia Baldi

Between Scholarship and Cultural Activism. The CDEC and the Changing Nature of the Italian Memoryscape: Interviews with the Former and Current Directors: Michele Sarfatti and Gadi Luzzatto Voghera

ABSTRACT This contribution aims at presenting and contextualizing the interviews made to the recent and former directors of the Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea (CDEC), offering basic elements to introduce the readers to the history of the institution and the context in which it operates, while at the same time raising some questions regarding current challenges.

issue 28 / no. 2 (2025) by Guri Schwarz

From Il libro della memoria to “Resistenti ebrei d’Italia”: A Personal Research Journey

ABSTRACT This article retraces the research path that led to a series of studies on the persecution, survival, and resistance of Jews in Italy between 1943 and 1945 that were carried out at the CDEC Foundation in Milan. Through a personal account of projects such as Il libro della memoria, L’alba ci colse come un tradimento, Salvarsi, and the digital initiative “Resistenti ebrei d’Italia,” Liliana Picciotto reflects on the sources, methods, and historiographical questions that shaped this work. Particular attention is devoted to the recent research on Jewish participation in the Italian Resistance, a subject long marginal in both scholarship and public memory.

issue 28 / no. 2 (2025) by Liliana Picciotto