Italy Suddenly Gets Ugly for Jews

Barbie Latza Nadeau

Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty

Anti-Jewish graffiti in Rome has little to do with Israel and Gaza, and everything to do with Europe’s ugly history of anti-Semitism.

ROME — There is still a faint black stain in the shape of a swastika on the Jewish memorial plaque along the Via Lungara near the Vatican in Rome. The plaque marks the spot where Rome’s Jews were held until they could be transferred in cattle cars to Auschwitz, and the inscription says simply, poignantly: “The 16th of October 1943 whole families of Roman Jews dragged from their homes by the Nazis were concentrated in this building and deported to the extermination camps. Of one thousand persons only sixteen survived.”

Someone tried to scrub the October 16 plaque clean, but over the past few nights across Rome more than 70 disturbing hate messages were scrawled with black and red paint on Jewish businesses and throughout the so-called Jewish Ghetto around the city’s main synagogue. Phrases like “Anne Frank Was A Liar,” “Dirty Jews,” “Jews your end is near,” and “Israel executioner” were written in spray paint alongside Celtic crosses and rows and rows of swastikas.

“It’s like 1933,” Riccardo Pacifici, the head of Rome’s Jewish community, told reporters. “This morning Rome woke up in the worst possible way. Its walls have been defaced by dozens of graffiti praising neo-Nazi hatred towards Jews.”

Rome’s streets are the latest in Europe to become bulletin boards for anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic sentiment. But unlike hate events in France, which have become violent and often involve the children of immigrants with Muslim backgrounds who claim Palestinian sympathies, Italian anti-Semitism is being blamed on Italians of European descent. Italy’s counterterrorism law enforcement agency DIGOS (Divisione Investigazioni Generali e Operazioni Speciali) says that the extreme right and extreme left wings of the Italian political spectrum have joined forces to spread the hate, issuing an alert warning, “There is new solidarity between the opposite extremists.”

Police will be studying footage from surveillance cameras that captured many of the anti-Semitic perpetrators in the act. According to a report by DIGOS published in the Italian press, most appear to be young men.

In Rome’s Jewish Ghetto, a group of elderly ladies sitting on a park bench near the synagogue lamented the surge in hatred. “These aren’t people with real political beliefs,” Michela Pavoncello, 68, told The Daily Beast. “These are opportunists looking for a reason to attack us.”

Many Italian cities have hosted pro-Palestinian sit-ins since the current conflict got underway, including a well-attended protest on the Rialto Bridge in Venice in mid-July. Rome’s chief rabbi, Riccardo di Segni, warns that the surge in anti-Semitic violence is not in line with pro-Palestinian sentiment. “These are groups that take advantage,” he said, making it clear they are “bolstering the neo-Nazi right.” At the same time, said Segni, “The left in Italy that supports Hamas must also reflect on their actions.”

Recommended article on FB Karina Hofström

Rome has the oldest Jewish community in all of Europe and one of the oldest continuous settlements in the world, but the country still struggles with its anti-Semitic past. There have been a number of attacks against Jewish interests over the last few years. In 2012, more than a dozen Italians belonging to the group “ultras” were arrested after attacking Jewish fans of England’s Tottenham football club in Rome’s Campo dei Fiori. They wielded baseball bats and knives, yelling “Jews, Jews, Jews” as they carried out the attacks.

Police have also closed down a number of white supremacist private clubs in Rome, which reportedly were decorated with swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans associated with “Blocco Studentesco,” which is the youth movement of Italy’s Casa Pound, which shares sympathies with Italy’s historic radical right-wing extremist parties.

Even popular politicians harbor old prejudices. Just last week Gianni Vattimo, a former European Parliamentarian and self-described Marxist philosopher, told Italy’s state radio station that “Israel is a bit worse than the Nazis,” and that he’d “like to shoot those bastard Zionists.” He also called upon the European community to pool resources to “buy Hamas some more rockets.”

Rome’s mayor, Ignazio Marino, expressed his solidarity with Rome’s Jewish community. “The anti-Semitic graffiti that appeared today in different areas of the city are a disgrace and an insult to all Romans,” he said. “Rome wants and needs to be a capital of dialogue and peace, not a barbaric battleground.”

Yom Kippur: Anti-Semitism is flourishing, but one man can no longer ignore his Jewish identity

The bigotry that Grant Feller faced as a boy made him turn his back and flee from his Jewishness. But a remark muttered at a dinner party changed all that….

foto: Independet

On Friday, I shall be shuffling down the north London streets of my childhood, helping my 86-year-old father to take a seat at the synagogue that welcomes us, in truth, only a couple of times a year. He has trouble getting around these days but Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement – is still to him the most important day of the year, and he insists that we walk rather than break the rules by parking the car nearby.

Aside from being the dutiful if slightly more sceptical son, I shall spend the day thinking not only about the many sins I have committed this past year and asking for some kind of forgiveness from a God whom I’m not sure is really there, but thinking also about two women –the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, and the ambitious young British politician Vicki Kirby.

Recommended it on FB Vlady Rozenbaum

Merkel has just announced that all German synagogues should have an armed guard during the imminent Yom Kippur holy day, for fear of attacks from anti-Israeli and pro-Muslim demonstrators. I’m pretty sure there will be just such a guard at my own synagogue in Finchley, as there is every year. Perhaps more than one this time.

But it’s Merkel’s “pro-Muslim” reasoning about the alarming rise of anti-Semitic attacks that makes me think of poor Vicki, a leading figure in Labour’s youth movement who has just been suspended by her party for claiming that Hitler might be the “Zionist God”. Labour’s candidate for Woking posted a series of vile anti-Israeli comments on the internet, including this astonishing political deduction: “We invented Israel when saving them from Hitler, who now seems to be their teacher… I will make sure my kids teach their children how evil Israel is.” Not the sort of sentiment that will endear her to her Jewish party leader, one imagines.

But it is the sort of anti-Semitic sentiment – though I’m sure Vicki herself is not an anti-Semite, merely astonishingly stupid – that is fairly par for the course in a Europe which is markedly more nationalistic and intolerant of minorities. These kinds of expressions are not, as Merkel and other leaders would like to think, expressed by agitated Muslims, but by pretty normal white, middle-class people.

Read more Yom Kippur: Anti-Semitism is flourishing,……

Barbara Toruńczyk o pokoleniu’68

Roberto Salvadori i Barbara Toruńczyk (Warszawa, 2004) CC BY-SA 2.5 Mariusz Kubik, http://www.mariuszkubik.pl – own work, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Kmarius

Do zainteresowanego Czytelnika

Ponad rok temu złożyłam w „Krytyce Politycznej” opowieść o pokoleniu 1968. Napisałam ją z myślą o młodych ze środowiska „Krytyki Politycznej” w 40. rocznicę tzw. wydarzeń marcowych. Chciałam opisać dla nich nasze doświadczenia. Nazywano nas komandosami. Nasze drogi życiowe zbiegły się ze szlakiem generacji 1968 na Wschodzie i na Zachodzie. Ale pobiegły dalej innym tropem. Chciałam podzielić się swoimi przemyśleniami, podsumować doświadczenia, przedstawić ludzi, którzy wywarli na nas wpływ. W „Krytyce Politycznej” 2008 nr 15 (lato) wydrukowano pierwszą część mojej opowieści. Zadedykowałam ją Sławomirowi Sierakowskiemu i zatytułowałam Opowieść o pokoleniu kontestatorów 1968. Kim byliśmy, kim jesteśmy, skąd i dokąd zdążamy. Część I: Polski Marzec, Praska Wiosna, Paryski Maj, Moskiewski Sierpień… Była to zarazem próba czegoś w rodzaju autobiografii umysłu i duchowości tego pokolenia, a w każdym razie mojej własnej. Ukazała się pod zmienionym tytułem Opowieść o pokoleniu Marca: Przesłanie dla nowej lewicy – część pierwsza. Części drugiej, ani nawet następnego numeru pisma nie udało się redakcji ogłosić. Mija rok od chwili, kiedy złożyłam ten szkic do druku. W obawie, że zdezaktualizuje się on, a także w poczuciu, że nie spotkał się ze zrozumieniem adresata, zawiadomiłam w dniu 28 maja 2009 redaktora Sławomira Sierakowskiego, że rezygnuję z druku na łamach wydawanego przez niego pisma.

Po opublikowaniu pierwszej części szkicu dobiegły mnie głosy czytelników, zapytujących o jego ciąg dalszy. Niniejszym przystępuję do druku drugiej części tego szkicu na łamach naszej strony internetowej. Rozdzialiki I-XI ogłosiła „Krytyka Polityczna”. Kolejne fragmenty, poczynając od XII, ukażą się w rytmie dwutygodniowym, rozpoczynając zarazem współpracę naszego kwartalnika z „Dwutygodnikiem”, pismem internetowym, ukazującym się od kwietnia 2009 pod redakcją Tomasza Cyza (www.dwutygodnik.com).

Przywracam zarazem własny tytuł tej opowieści.

Poświęcam ją pamięci Jacka Kuronia.

Reszte mozna zamowic tu: Barbara Toruńczyk o pokoleniu’68