Searching for Family Secrets in the Italian Jewish Past

In her recent memoir Mixed Messages, Eleanor Foa recounts her and her sister’s quest to uncover their family’s history in Italy following their mother’s death. Born in that country just before World War II, Foa had left with her parents for the U.S. as infant—just before it was too late for Jews like them to escape. Diane Cole, calling the book a “charming . . . jumble of family and historical research, emotional introspection, and convivial travelogue,” describes what they found:

In the medieval town of Soragna, [located not far from Parma], the sisters uncover the first local memories of their family lineage. At the Parmigiano Reggiano Museum, the wife of the farming couple that owns the museum comments that “Foa is a distinguished name in Soragna.”

Few traces of Soragna’s Jewish community remain; the one building that still stands had served as the town’s synagogue since at least 1584. By 1855, the Jewish community was large enough to finance an exuberant neoclassical-style renovation of the building, with Corinthian columns and a barrel-vaulted ceiling. In 1939, it was confiscated by the Fascist government. After the war, with a dwindling Jewish community—the last member died in 1971—it was abandoned altogether. Forty years after Mussolini had taken it, a patron brought new life to the synagogue building as a regional museum of Jewish life and history.

Foa also finds her family’s name in archival records. In a notation dating to 1547, Giuseppe Foa is described as the owner of a local lending bank. Foa is perplexed; her father, had always claimed he (and his daughters) had inherited a genetic incompetence with anything to do with money (notwithstanding his success as an economist who flew first class and stayed in four-star hotels at his clients’ expense). In his typewritten history, [the elder Foa] began the family story in 1551, just four years after the notation about his moneylending ancestor, whom he never mentioned.

Had her father not known about Giuseppe? Or was he ashamed of the stereotype of the Jew as usurer? Had her father perhaps used this narrative of financial incompetence as a way to distance himself from anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jews and money?

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: Benito Mussolini, Holocaust, Immigration, Italian Jewry, Jewish history

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society