Category: Focus

Focus

Building Memory. The Creation of the CDEC’s Archivio della Memoria and the Film Memoria

ABSTRACT This article, conceived as an institutional memoir written in two voices, retraces the creation of the CDEC’s Archivio della Memoria and the making of the documentary film Memoria (1997). Drawing on the perspectives of a historian and a filmmaker, it highlights the emergence of a new approach centered on filmed testimony and the central role of place in reconstructing the experience of persecution. The article also reflects on the challenges of translating testimony into film, balancing historical rigor and narrative form. It thus traces the development of the project leading to the production of Memoria.

issue 28 / no. 2 (2025) by Ruggero Gabbai and Marcello Pezzetti

New Horizons for Archival Sources: San Vittore Prison Detainees Encounter World War II Testimonies

ABSTRACT This article presents one of the core projects launched by the CDEC Foundation in its seventieth anniversary year: a workshop for San Vittore’s inmates focusing on testimonies from World War II. Its aim is to illustrate the framework within which the idea was conceived and structured, how the project unfolded, the challenges that were encountered, and the results that were achieved. As the project is still underway, there are no final conclusions to be outlined, yet it is already possible to observe the mold-breaking character of the workshop, in that it allowed CDEC to go beyond its traditional scope of action and generate a new type of social impact through its archive.

issue 28 / no. 2 (2025) by Bianca Ambrosio

“This is the story…of a Great Movement”: The Hashomer Hatzair Italy Collection at the CDEC Foundation

ABSTRACT This article examines the newly available Hashomer Hatzair Italy collection held in the CDEC Foundation Archives, acquired as a result of a project launched in October 2022. This is the first comprehensive collection on the subject, comprising newspapers, interviews, working materials, videos, pictures, official reports, and manifestos. Drawing on a selection of these sources, this article reconstructs the formation of the collection, highlights its research potential, and outlines related future projects. In particular, by incorporating personal memoirs, it also engages with ongoing debates. In doing so, it not only brings attention to these significant new sources, but also serves as a guide to their contents, clarifying the movement’s distinctive language and the key events that shaped its history, as reflected in the donated materials. Finally, this article identifies some lines of research for which this collection holds considerable historiographical value for the CDEC Foundation and its scholarly community.

issue 28 / no. 2 (2025) by Riccardo Abram Correggia

Tracing Routes and Memories: The Jews of North Africa and the Middle East in TRAME, a Digital Humanities Project

ABSTRACT This article examines TRAME: Tracing Routes and Memories—Entangled Jewish Experiences across the Mediterranean, a digital humanities project developed by the CDEC Foundation to document and interpret the migration of Jews from North Africa and the Middle East to Italy during the twentieth century. Building on the Edoth oral history fond, TRAME transforms oral testimonies, photographs, and archival materials into an interactive digital environment, offering new tools for research, education, and public engagement. Through digital mapping, story narratives, and thematic essays, the platform visualizes individual trajectories and collective experiences, highlighting how political, social, and personal factors shaped Jewish mobility across the Mediterranean. The project reweaves fragmented memories into a collective narrative, offering insight into the transnational origins of Italian Jewry and contributing to broader reflections on migration, memory, and identity in contemporary Europe.

issue 28 / no. 2 (2025) by Chiara Renzo

Spaces of Exclusion, Sounds of Resistance and Radicalization: Emotional Cartographies in the Ballads of Cheikh Mwijo

ABSTRACT Cheikh Mwijo was a central figure in the “Moroccan troubadour scene,” a grassroots cultural phenomenon that emerged within Moroccan immigrant communities in Israel’s periphery during the 1950s. Like other troubadours, he traveled across the newly established state, singing in the immigrants’ language, preserving the cultural heritage of Moroccan Jewry, and documenting their encounters with Israeli society. This article analyzes three “political ballads” he composed and performed, focusing on how they reflect the “mental maps” Moroccan immigrants used to interpret the divisions within Israeli space. By uncovering themes of mental mapping in Cheikh Mwijo’s ballads, the article explores how emotional experiences contributed to gradual shifts in consciousness—such as polarization and radicalization—among Moroccan immigrants as a result of social, cultural, and political marginalization in Israel. I argue that these shifts unfolded within the context of two major historical developments: the emergence of radical Mizrahi discourse and the rise of Mizrahi politics in the 1980s and 1990s. The article concludes with insights into the common duality in Moroccan Jews’ attitudes toward Israeli society—marked, on one hand, by sharp and even subversive criticism, and on the other, by moderation and forgiveness aimed at overcoming emotional burdens and integrating into society.

issue 27 / n.1 (2025) by Haim Bitton

Emotionally Dividing Baghdad: Spatial Memories of the Farhud throughout the Iraqi Jewish Diaspora

ABSTRACT On 1–2 June 1941, an anti-Jewish pogrom known as the Farhud took place in Baghdad, claiming a toll of 179 Jews murdered, thousands wounded, multiple women raped, and much property looted. This article tracks the accounts of two memoirists—Jews born in Baghdad who reconstructed their experiences of the Farhud from their subjective perspective in their biographical present in London. Through these agents of memory who documented their individual and collective memories, I show that the story of the Farhud and the Jews’ emigration from Iraq can be told in many different contexts. This contrasts with the many historiographic studies that deal with political aspects of the Farhud and, in this context, stirs debate among historians about the circumstances of the mass exodus of Jews from Iraq and addresses the manner in which the consciousness of the Farhud and its place in the collective memory in Israel are shaped.

issue 27 / n.1 (2025) by Tsionit Fattal-Kuperwasser

Teaching at a Lebanese AIU School in the 1930s: Rebecca Goldman’s Path from Kalisz to Beirut*

ABSTRACT This paper explores the microhistory of Rebecca Goldman, a Polish Jewish woman born in Kalisz who, after studying at the École Normale Israélite Orientale in Versailles, relocated to Beirut in 1935 as a teacher for the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Drawing extensively on her correspondence and educational reports preserved in the AIU archives, the article investigates Goldman’s interactions with and perceptions of the local Jewish community in Beirut. Rebecca Goldman’s narrative encapsulates the tensions of cultural identity experienced by Eastern European Jews navigating new socio-political environments. The paper also emphasizes how her Polish background and French educational formation created a significant cultural disconnect that affected her integration into the Lebanese Jewish community, leading to conflicts and misunderstandings. By examining Rebecca Goldman’s personal journey, this research contributes to broader discussions on the emotional landscapes of Jewish migration, identity formation, and the intricate interplay between personal narratives and collective histories.

issue 27 / n.1 (2025) by Magdalena Kozłowska

Mapping Moral Paths: The Spiritual Geography of Moroccan Rabbi Gabriel Elgrabli

ABSTRACT This essay offers a new reading of narratives of Jewish migration from the MENA region drawing on the preface to Tumat Yesharim (Jerusalem, 1989), a biblical exegesis by Rabbi Gabriel Elgrabli (spelled Eli-Qrabli). A Moroccan-born adherent of the (Anti-Zionist) Lithuanian Haredi Musar movement, Elgrabli engaged deeply with a tradition that emphasized ethical self-discipline. Composed in Israel of the 1980s, his autobiographical narrative charts a spiritual journey from Meknes to Jerusalem—through Europe and the Americas—in contrast to the singular path to the Holy Land that is often affirmed. As I argue, Elgrabli’s writing resists both Zionist cartographies that privilege Israel as an endpoint and the inward-facing, self-isolating path to perfection that the Musar model promotes. Instead, his journey exemplifies a diasporic spirituality rooted in displacement, divine providence, and ethical calling—a cartography animated not by destination but by personal transformation and ability to become a moral compass for the Sephardi grassroots. By weaving together Sephardi memory, Musar discipline, and geographic multiplicity, Elgrabli offers a unique model of mental maps. His account challenges dominant narratives of origin and return, presenting instead a layered map of spiritual becoming—rather than homecoming.

issue 27 / n.1 (2025) by Aviad Moreno

“From Egypt and Back”: Alternative Collective Memories among Egyptian Jews in Israel

ABSTRACT An analysis of the content and membership profile of the Facebook group “From Egypt and Back,” one of the biggest and most active groups of Egyptian Jews, in or out of social media, reveals the alternative that it has created to the dominant narrative in Egyptian Jewish collective memory, particularly in Israel. Whereas the dominant narrative has glorified the bourgeois, Frenchified, urban life of Egyptian Jews, “From Egypt and Back” has given voice to lower-middle-class and lower-class Jews and their experiences of Cairo, in particular. Its members have created a different mental map of Cairo that features its non-bourgeois neighborhoods, immersed in Egyptian-Arabic culture. This has generated high feelings of nostalgia, whose role as an emotion that affirms identity and cultural heritage, one that connects group members to their parents and family, and creates a community, will also be explored.

issue 27 / n.1 (2025) by Alon Tam

Between the Tower of Babel and the Eiffel Tower: Fantasy and Trauma in Naïm Kattan’s Farewell, Babylon

ABSTRACT Naim Kattan wrote Farewell, Babylon in 1976 in French, and it was published and translated first into English in 2005. This Novel is a memoir by Naim Kattan that recounts his experiences as a Jewish teenager in 1940s Baghdad, just before his departure to France. The book explores Iraq’s multicultural society and the political and social tensions that led to the decline of the Jewish community’s status. Kattan wrote his memories of Baghdad about twenty-five years after he left it, after establishing himself in his new home in Montreal, Canada, where he became a respected French-Canadian author. To a large extent, his identity as a French-Canadian infiltrates the Jewish-Iraqi-Arab story and reshapes Baghdad. this article traces the mental map at the core of Kattan’s work: how Kattan shapes his memories of Baghdad 30 years later. The article argues that the depiction of Jewish existence in Baghdad and Kattan’s experience of adolescence emerges between the lines of the Tower of Babylon as represented by the Eiffel Tower—as fantasy, desire, and potential redemption. The Baghdad space, in a certain sense, exists as a mirror image to the space of Paris in the tension between fantasy and trauma.

issue 27 / n.1 (2025) by Hadas Shabat Nadir