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Italy Jewish History Richer Than Gelato

Twenty years ago, an Italian television channel hired Annie Sacerdoti, a Jewish writer and editor in Milan, to produce a documentary about Jewish history in Italy\'s northern Lombardy region. At the time, Sacerdoti had long been an active member of the 10,000-strong Jewish community in Milan, the Lombard capital. But what she found while researching the program changed her sense of identity as an Italian Jew and in many ways changed her life. In small provincial towns around the region, she found Jewish cemeteries abandoned to the elements and deserted synagogues standing empty or used as carpenter shops or other places of business.
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January 1, 2004

Twenty years ago, an Italian television channel hired Annie Sacerdoti,
a Jewish writer and editor in Milan, to produce a documentary about Jewish
history in Italy’s northern Lombardy region.

At the time, Sacerdoti had long been an active member of the
10,000-strong Jewish community in Milan, the Lombard capital.

But what she found while researching the program changed her
sense of identity as an Italian Jew and in many ways changed her life. In small
provincial towns around the region, she found Jewish cemeteries abandoned to
the elements and deserted synagogues standing empty or used as carpenter shops
or other places of business.

“It was then that I realized that the story of Italian Jewry
was not just written in the big ghettos, such as Rome or Venice,” she recalled.
“It was also written, just as richly, in numerous hidden places, little centers
and hamlets almost totally forgotten by Italian Jews themselves.”

Those first discoveries sent Sacerdoti on a quest to
discover and publicize the wealth of Jewish heritage in Italy, which has
continued to the present. They enabled her, she said, to follow a subtle thread
that reconnected her with the past. Sacerdoti wrote a Jewish guidebook to Italy
in 1986 and, throughout the 1990s, edited a series of separate guidebooks
dedicated to Jewish heritage in individual Italian regions.

In fall 2003, Sacerdoti — the editor of Milan’s monthly
Jewish magazine, Il Bollettino — published a new, revised and updated “Guide to
Jewish Italy,” which combined tourist itineraries with an overview of
contemporary Jewish life throughout the country, including addresses of kosher
restaurants and other useful information.

“This book really caps 20 years of work,” Sacerdoti said at
a launch for the book in Rome. “Discovering Jewish history and culture this way
became something of an addiction — you find something, then keep going on and
on, trying to discover more, and one discovery leads to another, then another.”

Some 30,000-35,000 Jews live in Italy today, out of a total
population of 60 million people. More than two-thirds of Italy’s Jews live in Rome
and Milan.

Jewish history in Italy dates back to ancient Roman times,
however, and at one time or another over the past two millennia, Jews lived and
often left their traces in hundreds of towns, cities and villages up and down
the peninsula. Synagogues and Jewish quarters were abandoned when Jews were
expelled from cities and regions over the centuries, but also — as in the United
States — when Jews moved from small towns to big cities as part of
demographic shifts. About 8,000 Italian Jews were deported to their deaths in
the Holocaust.

Richly illustrated with color photographs, Sacerdoti’s book
— which will appear in English early in 2004 — looks at 2,000 years of Jewish
heritage and culture from top to toe of the Italian boot.

The aim, Sacerdoti said, was to present a real tourist
guide, including only sites that could easily be visited. It covers sites in 45
towns and cities, ranging from ancient catacombs in Rome to a medieval mikvah
in Sicily and more than a dozen glorious baroque synagogues in the northwest
region of Piedmont, most of them in towns where few or no Jews live today.

“Piedmont is unique. I don’t think that there is any other
region in Europe with such a wealth of well-preserved synagogues,” Sacerdoti
said.

“Italy has about 70 synagogue buildings, including the ruins
of two from ancient Roman times,” she said. “In addition, there are Jewish
museums throughout the country that display precious ritual objects, books,
documentation and other items from all epochs.”

As Sacerdoti points out, however, most Jewish heritage sites
in Italy, despite their splendor, are little-known to outsiders, or even to many
Italian Jews.

“It was really quite an experience for me to travel up and
down the country and to photograph them in depth,” said Alberto Jona Falco,
whose pictures illustrate the book. “I feel it was a mitzvah to photograph
them.”

Sacerdoti’s book falls within her activities over the past
few years in actively promoting Jewish heritage sites as attractions for
mainstream tourists and bringing knowledge and appreciation of Jewish culture
into the mainstream.

Among other things, Sacerdoti has been one of the organizers
of the annual “European Day of Jewish Culture,” which promotes awareness of
Jewish heritage in two-dozen European countries. It was started in 1999.

The initiative has a particularly high profile in Italy and
annually draws more than 40,000 visitors on a single day to Jewish museums,
synagogues, cemeteries and special events in several dozen locations around the
country. There also have been several other Jewish heritage promotional
initiatives in various parts of Italy in recent years. These include the
establishment of specific Jewish heritage itineraries sponsored by local
tourism authorities in the northeast region of Friuli Venezia Giulia.

In Rome, a new foundation is working to expand the Jewish
community’s museum, and plans are under way for celebrations next spring to
mark the 100th anniversary of Rome’s Great Synagogue, an ornate structure with
a distinctive square dome that towers above the Tiber River at the edge of the
old Jewish ghetto.

The Rome synagogue, along with the old ghetto in Venice,
which comprises several restored synagogues and a fascinating museum, and the
magnificent Moorish-style synagogue in Florence, are Italy’s three best-known
Jewish heritage sites. All three draw tens of thousands of visitors each year.

Recently, the Jewish Heritage Grants Program of the New
York-based World Monuments Fund awarded the Florence synagogue, built between
1870-1882, a $50,000 grant toward structural work to help repair its roof.

“I hope that my work will spark interest in other Jewish
sites in Italy and enable them to open to the public,” Sacerdoti said. “Tourism
can bring new life to these places — even in places where there is no longer a
Jewish community.”  

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