Union of Jewish Communities and the Italian government guaranteeing the right to observe Shabbat and religious holidays in employment and education.


1996 Erich Priebke, German second in command at the time of the Fosse Ardeatine massacre, is put on trial. The verdict of “guilty but not punishable”, due to the prescribed 20-year statute of limitations, leads to rioting outside the court and outcry in Parliament. TheMayor of Rome turns off the lights on the major monuments in protest. The Supreme Court of Cassation orders a retrial.


1997 At the second trial Priebke is found guilty of mass murder and crimes against humanity. He is sentenced to life imprisonment later commuted to house arrest.


2010 On 17 January Pope Benedict XVI becomes the second Pope to visit the Great Temple in Rome.


On Holocaust Day (Giornata della Memoria) ElieWiesel addresses the Italian Parliament.


2011 Today out of a total Italian population of nearly 60,000,000 fewer than 30,000 are Jews.About half of them reside in Rome. There are 16 synagogues in Rome.


tHeY Came bearInG GolD SUSAN KIKOLER


Of all the events that befell the Jewish community of Rome duringWorldWar II, one in particular has entered the realm of myth: on 26 September 1943 the Head of the German Police and Security Services, Herbert Kappler, summoned the leaders of Rome’s Jewish community and demanded a ransom of 50 kilos of gold to be delivered within 36 hours, or else 200 Jews would be deported to certain death either in Germany or on the Russian Front. Rome’s Jews faced a seemingly


impossible task. Five kilos were collected immediately but time was soon running out. The Jewish leadership approached the Vatican, which offered to lend the outstanding sumto be repaid without interest at the end of the war. Yet suddenly this aid became unnecessary. As Alexander Stille wrote in


Benevolence and Betrayal, “It seemed that the whole of Rome – eager to express its disgust with the German occupation – had risen up in defence of the Jews.Word of the ransom had spread quickly through the streets and brought Christians and Jews from all parts of the city to converge on the synagogue, carrying gold watches, earrings,


pins, bracelets, cufflinks, wedding rings, cigarette cases and coins.” Some even bought gold on the black market. Many gifts were anonymous. More than 50 kilos were raised and


delivered in time, but it was all a ploy. On 16 October 1943 the German military surrounded the Ghetto and rounded up more than 1,000 Jews, men, women and children. Only a handful ever returned. The Italian military were not involved as


the Germans could not trust them not to be sympathetic to the Jews, and there were numerous instances of locals sheltering and aiding Jews to escape. In 1947, Kappler was tried by a military


court in Italy and sentenced to life imprisonment including four years’ solitary confinement. In 1976, terminally ill with cancer, he was moved to a military hospital from where in 1977 his wife helped him to escape hidden in a suitcase. Kappler died in Germany in 1978. In 1961 the story was made into a film,


L’Oro di Roma (The Gold of Rome), directed by Carlo Lizzani, now a classic of Italian cinema.


two remarkable women


tul l ia Zevi , who died in January 2011 aged 91, was a pillar of Italy’s Jewish community and an ardent anti-fascist. One of four children of a bourgeois Jewish family,


Zevi was on holiday with her parents in Switzerland in 1938 when Italy passed its racial laws. The family, known for her father’s anti-fascist beliefs, moved to France and later the US asWorldWar II raged. She returned to Italy in 1946 and worked as a


journalist as well as with various centre-left political parties. Zevi has written about her return: “It seemed right, having had the fortune of having


survived, to return and participate in the reconstruction of this traumatized community in chaos, and also to participate in the rebirth of democracy in Italy following the defeat of fascism.” She headed the Union of Italian Jewish Communities from 1983 to 1998, and even after that remained active in the Jewish community, frequently commenting in the media about Jewish-Vatican relations in particular. In 1992 she was awarded Italy’s highest civilian honour for “Profound and dignified interventions that she made in defense of


the Jews and all minorities”. Her husband Bruno Zevi, an architect, was a Jewish leader and


member of Italy’s clandestine Justice and Liberty movement while fascists held power.


rita levi-montalcini, aged 102, is a Nobel Laureate, a Knight Grand Cross and a lifemember of the Italian Senate. Born in Turin, Levi graduated as a doctor and soon


went into research but her career was interrupted by Mussolini’s 1938Manifesto of Race and the subsequent introduction of laws barring Jews fromacademic and professional careers. She decided to remain in Italy and continued her neurological research in a home laboratory. In 1946 she began a long stay in the USA, where she


isolated the nerve growth factor, NFG, for which, in 1986, with colleague Stanley Cohen, she received the Nobel Prize. In 1961 she returned to Italy to become director of the Research


Centre of Neurobiology in Rome, and later founded the European Brain Research Institute. In 1999 she was appointedAmbassador to the Food andAgriculture Organisation of the United Nations and wrote and engaged in public activity to combat world hunger. Since 2001, she has served in the Italian Senate as a Senator for Life.


She takes an active part in debates, taking a centre-left position, and recently, despite being hard of hearing and nearly blind, vowed to remain a political force in the country. She is frequently insulted by the right for her Jewish origins and her age. Today she is the oldest living Nobel laureate and the first to reach a


100th birthday.


JEWISH RENAISSANCE OCTOBER 2011


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