Presentation and documentary screening
On the occasion of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2015, the Embassy of Italy, with the Italian Cultural Institute and the Centro Primo Levi New York and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, will host an event celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation (CDEC) in Milan with guests CDEC’s President and Professor of Law Giorgio Sacerdoti, and CDEC’s Director of Research Liliana Picciotto. The Center for Contemporary Jewish in Milan (CDEC), one of the first institutes for Holocaust Studies founded in post-war Europe and the main archive and research center on the history of 20th century Italian Jewry.
The program features a special screening of a nine minute archival film of the Della Seta family. The only known filmed document of Italian Jewish life before the Holocaust, which was recently restored by the IRCPAL (National restoration institute) and the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – Cineteca Nazionale. Like thousands of other documents of Italian Jewish life, the original reels are preserved in the CDEC archive.
IN COLLABORATION WITH
ABOUT THE IMAGE: Left to right: Galliano Servadio with his wife Maria; bride and groom, Iole Campagnano
and Silvio Della Seta. Between them in the back with braids is Elena Della Seta, Silvio’s sister.
RSVP
Please Make a Reservation by February 2, 2015 at 2 PM
Reservations are available until we reach
capacity or by the above date/time (whichever comes
first)
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LOCATION
Embassy of Italy – Auditorium
3000 Whitehaven St, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20008
MORE INFORMATION
In a collection of essays published by Yad Vashem in 2009, David Bankier and Dan Michman devote one chapter to the simultaneous creation of Holocaust research centers in Poland, France, Italy, Germany and Israel. These centers have remained the repositories not only of the earliest documentation of the history of anti-Jewish persecution in the nazi-fascist era, but also of the history of the emergence of Holocaust research as a field of historical study.
These centers which were created in the immediate aftermath of the war, have for many decades been arduously working toward acquiring acknowledgment by the European societies that perpetrated the extermination of the Jews. The centers also represent the development of key interpretative models of an understanding of international action and justice which were later integrated in the mission of the Holocaust Museum (1993) and the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (1998).
Celebrating the 60 years of the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Milan, means to revisit the exceptional work of young Italian Jews who after the war were committed to understand the tragedy their community had suffered. They began to retrace and disclose the twenty years of a fascist dictatorship which some of their fathers had embraced and others had fought and that the broader Italian society was trying to forget. CDEC was founded by the Italian Jewish Youth Federation in Venice in 1955 under the directorship of Roberto Bassi. Its initial purpose in post-war Italy was to study Jewish participation in the Italian resistance and assert the commitment of Italian Jewry in the anti-fascist movement.
During this period, CDEC became the leading research institution on the history of the persecution of the Jews in Italy, collecting and recording testimonies and memories of the Italian Jewish community who experienced the Shoah. CDEC’s studies began to rupture the silence in mainstream Italy about the Fascist past, the dictatorship and the persecutions.
In recent years, the CDEC has expanded its archive to include Italian Jewish life since the emancipation of 1861-1870 and the Italian Zionist experience. Today it is the leading archive and research institute dedicated to the history of 20th century Italian Jewry and houses thousands of documents, photographs and artifacts of Jewish life in Italy.
In spite of a growing bibliography in English and a substantial historiography of Fascism, the Italian chapter of the Holocaust is still relatively unacknowledged. Although many American and Israeli scholars have successfully integrated the most recent research and primary sources in their work, some major research institutions in Holocaust studies often continue to refer to old “apologetic” narratives about the Jews living under Italian Fascism.
Today, CDEC seeks to reach international audiences making available sixty years of Holocaust research in Italy dispelling misreadings of the persecution of Italian Jews, taking part in contemporary debates on the disintegration of civil liberties the construction of collective memory.
GIORGIO SACERDOTI
Giorgio Sacerdoti (Nizza 1943) is Professor of International Law and J. Monnet Chair of European Law at the Bocconi University. He holds a Master in law from Columbia Law School. Prof. Sacerdoti was president of the Jewish Community of Milan from 1982 to 1990, and is a member of the Board of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities. In 1987 he was the chief negotiator on the agreement regulating relations between the Italian State and the Jewish communities (Intesa). He has been involved with the prosecutions of Nazi criminals and the recovery of Holocaust era stolen Jewish assets. He curated the German and Italian editions of the publication of his mother’s letters to his grandparents who perished during the Holocaust (Prospero Verlag 2010, Archinto 2013).
LILIANA PICCIOTTO
Liliana Picciotto (Cairo 1947) is the director of the archive of the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Milan. She holds a degree in political science and specializes in the history of the Jews of Italy under Fascism and the Italian Social Republic.
Her research on the deportation of the Jews in Italy resulted in the publication of Il Libro della Memoria, I Giusti d’Italia and L’alba ci colse a tradimento: gli ebrei del campo di Fossoli, on the largest concentration camp in Italy. With Ruggero Gabbai and Marcello Pezzetti she co-authored the documentary film Memoria and The Jews of Fossoli. She is currently completing a comprehensive database of the strategies of survival during the fascist-nazi persecutions.
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