Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on January 30, 2022

Whoever saves one life saves the whole world. The passage, reported in the Mishnah (the text that reports the Hebrew oral tradition) is an expression of human morality which, unaware or not, opposed the tragedy of the Shoah before and during the Second World War. The memory of the extermination of the Jews is commemorated annually on January 27date on which theanniversary of the conquest of Auschwitz by the Red Army and that it has symbolically placed an end to the Nazi-Fascist Holocaust.The Jewish maxim was recalled at the end of the lectio magistralis held by the professor of Contemporary History Andrea Riccardi, founder of the Community of SantEgidio and former minister for International Cooperation, on the occasion of the Day of Remembrance in 2022.A sign that reminds us, In the evil of the Shoah, the Resistance of the Righteous(This is the title of the lesson, which can be found on the YouTube channel of the University of Padua, organizer of the event), in which the professor contrasted the icy Nazi-Fascist ferocity with the stories of some, among many, who remembered their humanity.

The alleged omnipotence of evil and the power of the powerless, of those who they are not remembered as heroesbut as human beings who saved thousands of lives in their daily lives.He was an example of this Regina Bettin, Paduan nanny who saved the children and the Sacerdoti family, Jews of Venice, from the 1943 train coming from Rome, loaded with roundups in the Jewish ghetto, and headed for Auschwitz. Despite hunger and fear of getting caught, Queen is now Righteous among the Nations.The Shoah is European history recalls Andrea Riccardi. Lantisemetism it was not the cause or consequence of the war, but it was background and the heart of the event itself.Every country in Europe was guilty: first with the racist laws, as the professor defines them, antechamber of the Wannsee conference (whose eightieth anniversary occurs), where it was decided the Europeanization of extermination, or the systematic elimination of the Jewish people, with the collaboration of the states invaded by Nazism, from France to Poland. According to the American scholar Christopher Browning, in the summer of 1942 there were 75-80% of Jews alive in Europe; 11 months later, 20-25% remained alive , cites Andrea Riccardi.

Italy also collaborated: after 8 September 1943, the Italians led the Germans into the massacre of Lake Maggiorewhere Jewish children became bargaining chips for a few lire, as well as in Roman ghetto. Each country must become aware that the Shoah is ones own fault and at the same time the origin of a united Europe: remembering means being free, preventing the horrors and dictatorships of the past from having repercussions in the present. In an upside-down world, the central question posed by the professor: Was it humanly possible to do more for the Jews when the bans called for death?Some said yes. In the roundup of the ghetto of Rome, Andrea Riccardi recalls the emotion and prayers of some and the exhortations of others to save a family in Trastevere. Or again, of the professor Amendola, who hid the Jewish pupil Michele Tagliacozzo at home, now historian of the Shoah. Or again Don Libero, who showed up in a monastery with the bogus order from the Curia to save the Jews.

In Nazi Romania, the young man Rabbi Alexandru Safran, thanks to his spiritual strength and contacts with high Orthodox spheres, saved 57% of the Romanian Jews from extermination.Righteous among the Nations who left few tracesif not in the memory of their saved: so it happened to the Paduan Giorgio Perlascafascist, than in Hungary he improvised himself as an official of the Spanish embassy to save thousands of Jewsthanks to a Spanish law of 1492.

Oskar SchindlerAustrian and member of the Nazi party, who became famous thanks to the film by Steven Spielberg, he saved 1200 Jews by hiding them as workers in his war industry. In the only Germany about 5,000 Jews were saved, many of them hiding in Berlin.

How many of them met one of those Righteous?The Memory of the Shoah is a memory that slips into the past, a memory that must therefore be cultivated.With the terrible Evil we must also remember the Memory of the Good.Evil is not omnipotent, we must resist itConcluded Professor Riccardi, recalling that sentence from the Mishnah and a lesser known one from the Islamic sra: Whoever kills a person is as if he had killed the whole of humanity and whoever has vivified a person will be as if he had given life to the whole humanity .

Damiano Martin

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Andrea Riccardi tells the Evil of the Shoah and the Good of the Righteous - D1SoftballNews.com

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