Back to Rome

Thursday, Oct. 22, 2015

Rome

We began the day with study of a poem of Immanuel Frances (1618-c. 1710) an Italian poet and rabbinical scholar.  It is titled, “The Old Whore’s Lament”:

Where are the merchants who used to chase after me to purchase my favors?

O malevolent Time!

Nowadays, they abhor my company; when I call for them, there is no answer.

How has my merchandise been brought so low!

How can I possibly sell it, when there is no buyer?

Once they would have given all their wealth for it.

Now I would be lucky if they took it free of charge.

Haim made us aware of parallels to parts of Lamentations; I found them hard to see.

We began our touring with a visit to the Roman ghetto, created in 1555 and in operation until the unification of Italy, when it was abolished in 1870.  Just outside the walls is the Fountain Monumentale delle Tartarughe (Turtle Fountain) which served as the water source for the entire ghetto:

  

As we walked into the small ghetto, we saw small brass plaques which have been placed in the streets in front of homes from which were taken the Jews of Rome who were murdered at Auschwitz:

  

The evacuation of Rome’s Jews took place on a single day, October 16, 1943, and that day is memorialized by a plaque:

We stood under the plaque and read sections from Robert Katz’s Black Sabbath, A Journey Through a Crime Against Humanity detailing the response of the Romans and of the Vatican to the Nazi genocide.

We then visited the Jewish Museum where we met with a remarkable woman, Anna Foa, who is a professor at the Sapienza University in Rome.  She lectured to us on the history of the Jews in Rome with particular attention to the events of WW II and the Shoah, and took questions.  She was delightful and very informative.

The Great Synagogue was built in 1904 and is adjacent to the museum:

It is an historic building, first because of the terrorist attack of 1982, but mostly because it was the location of the first ever visit of a pope to a synagogue.  That was Pope John Paul II in 1986.  The synagogue still functions for some of the 14,000 Jews who currently live in Rome, and there is a daily minyan.  The building was spared during WW II as were most of the important buildings of Rome.

After lunch a free afternoon!  Shopping and packing took up the time, as we leave tomorrow. 

We met again at 5:00 for a wrap-up study session, sealing the memories of our travels.  Then a farewell dinner in one of the kosher restaurants in the ghetto.  It has been an amazing trip.  Haim has put together an incredible two-month course on the history of Italian Jewry, and we did the whole thing in ten days.  There's lots more in our reader to study after we get home.

Most of our fellow students are going home, but tomorrow we will take the fast train to Bari in the far southeast of Italy (on the heel) and begin a walking tour of Apulia with Marcia and Eric Birken and Sheila and Peter Philippsohn.  So, more to come!