issue 28 / no. 2 (2025)
Issue ID: 28
no. 2 (2025)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
