Remember October 16 so as not to trivialize Hamas
If the memory of October 16, 1943 is not linked to the sentence of October 7, 2023, the meaning of the anniversary fades to the point of becoming yet another self-absolution of those who do not want to come to terms with the past. The speech by Gregory Alegi , Luiss Guido Carli teacher
«My first contact with Judaism dates back to 16 October 1943, when the Roman Jews were deported. I went to school alone. I was quite old, I was 11 years old. But that day my mother came to pick me up. He told me that they had come looking for my father and that therefore we couldn't go home." This is what Gianni Jona Lasinio, born in 1932, one of the greatest physicists of his generation, says to his son in the biographical documentary A Theoretical Life .
What the mother didn't tell Gianni, and what the film omits, is that the father had narrowly saved himself by leaving from the back staircase while the Nazis were climbing up from the main one. I know this because Pietro Davide, Gianni's son, was my classmate in elementary school, such a close friend that we exchanged the most intimate family stories. But, upon closer inspection, I only know this because Gianni was saved, unlike the 1,023 Jews rounded up and deported that day, and the countless others exterminated during Hitler's madness, also with Italian help.
ANTI-SEMITISM, YESTERDAY AND TODAY
I am convinced that history is not made with anniversaries, because the things that really matter are remembered every day and because events are not point-like but have remote roots and project their consequences forward. For example, October 16th, which today marks the 80th anniversary, derives directly from the laws passed in 1938, which excluded Jews from Italian society, starting from schools of all levels, as teachers or students. And they are all connected to the anti-Semitic prejudice which has its origins in the most remote past and resurfaces whenever there is a pretext, be it minimizing the attack on a boy wearing a kippah , mocking the president of the attacked Ukraine from Russia, to look the other way when news arrives of a possible attack against the Synagogue in Rome, to justify the massacre by Hamas of over 1,300 Israelis, the kidnapping of another 200 and the wounding of another 3,277.
This is why anyone who distinguishes between an Israel to be condemned for this or that reason (only a few times real) and the Jews as individuals is hypocritical, denying that there is continuity between that Jewish State and the cultural and religious identity of individuals. This is why the fracture created in 1938 between Italian society and the Jews, rejected in a virtual ghetto less than a century after their emancipation by the Kingdom of Sardinia (and extended in 1861 to the Kingdom of Italy), did not end. has never really healed, as indicated by their substantial absence in the armed forces, in the university and in the institutions which, after having expelled them in 1938, did not have the courage to expel those who had occupied their positions.
Faced with the resurgences of anti-Semitism in the West, from the desecrations of cemeteries to the Stars of David traced on houses and shops in Berlin in recent days, from solidarity with the Hamas terrorists to the presence of former Italian terrorists (the same ones for whom the missiles were intended of Ortona? Who knows…), we must ask ourselves why Israel should not defend itself from those who work hard to implement the destruction foreseen by its statute. We must ask ourselves why Israel's enemies always find those who justify "without ifs or buts" its most horrendous actions, including rapes and slaughters, while Israel has to explain the reasons for its very existence. We must ask ourselves whether abandoning Israel to its fate, denying it the right to defense in the face of attacks which is even enshrined in the UN charter, would not be the certification of disinterest in our roots and democracy.
There is no shortage of answers to these questions. Indeed, they unfold for over twenty centuries, along an ideal line that connects the "If not now, when?" by Rav Hillel (not by chance chosen by Primo Levi as the title of his novel on the Jewish partisans in Russian territory in 1943-45) to the overflight of Auschwitz by the F-15s of the Israeli air force on 4 September 2003 (to give substance to the promise of "Never again").
If the memory of October 16, 1943 is not linked to the sentence of October 7, 2023, the meaning of the anniversary fades to the point of becoming yet another self-absolution of those who really don't want to come to terms with the past. Of those who fragment the phenomenon to try to make it invisible. Of those who, ultimately, prefer to mourn the dead Jews rather than recognize the living ones' right to defend themselves.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/16-ottobre-1943-antisemitismo-hamas/ on Mon, 16 Oct 2023 05:22:39 +0000.