Convention on East European Jewish History Held in Turin

The city of Turin will be peacefully “overrun” by scholars on Judaica today and tomorrow during an international convention on “The Jews of Eastern Europe: From Utopia to Revolution” covering the period between 1897 and 1947.

The convention was organized by the Turin Jewish community and the history department of Turin University, and sponsored by the Piedmont regional government and the regional and provincial departments of culture. Scholarly papers by specialists such as Nora Levin, Israel Getzler, Jonathan Frankel, Victor Zaslavsky, John Bunzl and David Meghnagi will be delivered, as well as personal recollections by Holocaust survivors.

The planning of this first convention was entrusted to Marco Brunazzi, head of Turin University’s Gaetano Salvemini Historical Institute, and Meghnagi, a psychoanalyst with a solid background in Jewish studies based on his recent, youthful past as a rabbi in Tripoli before he emigrated to Rome.

BASIC PREMISES OF THE CONVENTION

Asked by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency to explain the basic premises of the convention, Meghnagi said:

“It started out with the request for a panel discussion in commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which I felt was not sufficient. Memory and history regarding Jews often contradict each other. Our fantasies are fogged over with prejudices. As Simone Veil (former President of the European Parliament) said, ‘The problems of the past must be rekindled in order to understand the present.’ The Christian world has completely forgotten what the Jewish reality was before Auschwitz.”

Continuing, Meghnagi said: “For example, at the Warsaw Museum no section has been set aside for the Jews of that city, even though before the war one in every four citizens was Jewish. Revisiting this population, this territory, by re-evoking and reanalyzing its past, will permit Europe to understand itself better.”

The point of departure for Meghnagi is that the end result of the three main ideological movements of the late 19th century — Socialism, Jewish nationalism and Zionism, and the Jewish Enlightment — all aimed at obliterating the Jewish character of the diaspora communities as an integral part of their vision of solving “the Jewish problem.”

This old thesis, which is the last thing Jews want today, Meghnagi noted, must be rethought in terms of contemporary needs and in terms of the interrelationships between the diaspora, Israel and the world at large.

“It is possible to learn more from a period of crisis than from a period of continuity,” he said. “We are living through such a period now, and in the crisis of our collective memory, of our fantasies, we find that the old identity has been lost and a new one has yet been constructed.”