// far-flung //
Fall 2016
Lionella's Florence
Julia Crain
During my first Wednesday night in Florence, I ate alone at “Ruth’s Kosher Vegetarian Restaurant” next to the Great Synagogue. If you’d asked me six months ago, when I was filling out my application to study abroad in Florence, what kinds of things I would be doing in Italy my first week there, this certainly wouldn’t have been on the list. But there I was, wearing my Hebrew “Barnard” shirt, realizing that pointing myself out as a Jew, alone, at night, in a foreign city, maybe wasn’t the best idea. Out the restaurant window, I saw the four Italian soldiers, armed with assault rifles, who stand at 24/7 guard outside the Synagogue. I simultaneously felt comforted by their presence and sobered by the fact that they are necessary.
The truth is, I’m not really sure why I went to Ruth’s that night. I don’t keep Kosher, and I certainly don’t like eating alone. Maybe I subconsciously gravitated towards the only distinctly Jewish place to eat because the reality that I had just moved halfway across the world, alone, for four months, was starting to sink in, and I yearned for something—anything—that felt familiar.
My pursuit of the familiar in the midst of all things foreign led me to ask the rabbi of the Synagogue to connect me with members of the Florence Jewish community. I wanted to use my time in Italy to learn more about the history of the Jewish community there. A few weeks later, I had the opportunity to meet and speak (in my broken Italian) with 85-year-old Lionella Neppi Modona.
When I arrived at Lionella’s apartment, she was waiting for me at the door. Her apartment felt strikingly like my grandparents’ apartment in the States. Jewish texts and little tchotchkes lined her shelves. Family photographs and prints of famous artworks decorated her walls. In one photo, a young woman wore an Israeli Defense Forces uniform. When I asked who the woman was, she replied, “My daughter. My little soldier.” And, of course, she offered me cookies and coffee.
Lionella survived the Holocaust in Florence. When she was seven-years-old, Mussolini enacted stringent Racial Laws, which severely restricted the welfare and freedom of Jews and other minority groups in Italy. She was kicked out of her public school and forced to enter a segregated Jewish school. Her father lost his job as a professor. “All [within] a few hours, we had to change our life.”
Lionella emphasized the Jewish community’s last-ditch efforts to rally together and to help the poorest of the poor. When I asked about her rabbi’s reaction to the laws, she looked at me, the pain in her eyes palpable, and spoke softly: “Nathan Cassuto [the rabbi of the Great Synagogue in Florence] was deported because he wished to remain here with the Jews of Florence. He was taken and brought away.”
Then, Jewish families started to disappear. Realizing that they needed to protect themselves, Lionella’s family went into hiding in Arezzo, a Tuscan town near Florence. As I asked her about this experience, I found myself feeling flustered by the degree of suffering I was asking her to recall. How ridiculous my questions must have sounded as they came out of my mouth: What was it like to share a single room with your whole family and not be able to leave that room--for five years?
After the war, her family returned to Florence, only to find another family occupying their apartment. The family’s displacement and subsequent burden to find a new place for themselves in Florence—both physically and in the abstract—reifies the Florentine Jews’ unimaginable task of rebuilding their community. “We were alive, so we were happy…but there [were] no families. They completely disappeared.”
Hearing the realities of Lionella’s life during and after Jewish persecution under the Nazi regime, I felt crippled with guilt born from my comfort, privilege, and endless opportunity for Jewish engagement back in New York. I felt so distant from Lionella. And yet our similarities as Jewish women only served to magnify the inescapable: in a twist of fate, I could have been her and she, me.
But her story is not without positive memories. Lionella recalled the soldiers from the Jewish Brigade of the British Army, who came from Mandatory Palestine after the Liberation and “remained here [in Florence] for a few months to help the Jews, the children, to dance the hora, to teach Hebrew…They also married the Jewish girls from Florence…They were much loved. It was very important, the presence of these Jewish people from Eretz Israel.” Lionella ultimately met her husband, Giuseppe, another Italian Jew, at a Zionist meeting in Florence when they were in their twenties.
I thought back to my experience at Ruth’s, when I saw the soldiers outside the Synagogue. I asked Lionella how she felt seeing these soldiers every time she went to services. “Ah, before they were there, it was very dangerous, you could be killed. You have to thank them! They have been there for about thirty years, since 1982, after [an attack in] Rome…They are there to defend us, not to be against us.” What a shift that must have been for Lionella: during her childhood, she hid from Italian soldiers for fear of being murdered. Now she entrusts them with her life every time she goes to synagogue.
Once I heard Lionella’s story, it seemed to follow me wherever I went. And while Lionella told me of the stories of Jewish people in Italy during her lifetime, I, too, have born witness to the tenuous, complicated position of Jews in current day Italian society—forming my own collection of memories and reflections.
30,683...30,683...30,683. In disbelief of the magnitude, my Italian history professor repeated this number as we walked through the German World War II Military Cemetery just outside of Florence. He guided my class through the graves of 30,683 Nazi soldiers. He passed out flyers written by the German War Graves Commission, which explained that the graves serve as reminders of the horrors of war, and that we are among the graves of World War II “victims.” There was no mention of Jews in the pamphlet. I thought about the purpose of visiting cemeteries, which, generally speaking, is to pay respect to the dead and to honor their legacies. But here we stood, whitewashing the atrocities these soldiers committed, labeling them “victims,” and respectfully considering their lost lives. The more my professor repeated the number 30,683, the more I thought of a different number: 6 million.
In the Jewish Ghetto in Venice, the Chabad set up a massive sukkah. Approaching the structure--decked out in orange streamers and construction paper mobiles—a rabbi greeted me, wished me chag sameach [happy holiday], and invited me for dinner that evening. The reappropriation of the ghetto as a space for joy and celebration and life felt like a redemption.
Feeling adventurous, I took the train, alone, to Lucca for the day. A few stops before arriving, I noticed a huge swastika graffitied onto another train station. No one else seemed to notice. No one else seemed to care. My heart racing, I felt a strange sense of calm knowing that because of the way I look, I blend in with the local population. I had to wonder how Lionella would feel if she were sitting next to me on the train.
At one Chabad shabbat dinner, I was the only person, at a table of thirty, who couldn’t speak Hebrew. As the rabbi gave his Dvar Torah in Hebrew, I twiddled my thumbs, picking out the only words I could understand (countable on my fingers). This was the moment at which I wished I paid more attention in Hebrew school.
At the end of my visit with Lionella, I asked her what she hoped for the future of the Jews in Florence. Her response was simple: “To find a good Rav [rabbi], to have young people go more to synagogue, and to have a good teacher for the children. They have to know Hebrew better than they are learning now. I hope that will be better in the future.” If embarrassment over my inability to participate at the Chabad shabbat dinner wasn’t motivation enough to learn Hebrew, this certainly sufficed.
Annoyed about my train to Perugia’s delay, I paced back and forth around the Santa Maria Novella Train Station, a place that is, at this point, more familiar to me than Penn Station. Bored, my eyes wandered and landed on a plaque that almost blends into the busy station. The inconspicuous plaque on platform 16 marks the site where Jews of Florence were carted off to their deaths in concentration camps. Every year, millions walk on the battleground of such inexpressible brutality, hauntingly unaware of the site’s significance.
Yom Kippur in Italy meant eating a whole pesto pizza as my pre-fast meal and then a whole bowl of pasta as my post-fast meal.
Surrounded by staring Italian eyes, we—perfect strangers from all around the world—stood, holding onto one another in a nondescript Florentine park for Havdalah. Ushering in the sunset that marked the end of Yom Kippur, we sang the melodies that unite us as one people. With the thickly New York-accented rabbi leading, substituting coffee grinds for spices, and appealing to the congregation to email Netanyahu for an egalitarian prayer space at the Kotel, we prayed openly, loudly, and in all of our eccentricity. With the combination of American ex-pats, young study abroad students, and local Italian progressive Jews, this celebration felt like a fulfillment of Lionella’s hopes. Despite the far-from-ideal status of Jews within current Italian society, we proved the unwavering effort to build and to maintain community here.
The truth is, I’m not really sure why I went to Ruth’s that night. I don’t keep Kosher, and I certainly don’t like eating alone. Maybe I subconsciously gravitated towards the only distinctly Jewish place to eat because the reality that I had just moved halfway across the world, alone, for four months, was starting to sink in, and I yearned for something—anything—that felt familiar.
My pursuit of the familiar in the midst of all things foreign led me to ask the rabbi of the Synagogue to connect me with members of the Florence Jewish community. I wanted to use my time in Italy to learn more about the history of the Jewish community there. A few weeks later, I had the opportunity to meet and speak (in my broken Italian) with 85-year-old Lionella Neppi Modona.
When I arrived at Lionella’s apartment, she was waiting for me at the door. Her apartment felt strikingly like my grandparents’ apartment in the States. Jewish texts and little tchotchkes lined her shelves. Family photographs and prints of famous artworks decorated her walls. In one photo, a young woman wore an Israeli Defense Forces uniform. When I asked who the woman was, she replied, “My daughter. My little soldier.” And, of course, she offered me cookies and coffee.
Lionella survived the Holocaust in Florence. When she was seven-years-old, Mussolini enacted stringent Racial Laws, which severely restricted the welfare and freedom of Jews and other minority groups in Italy. She was kicked out of her public school and forced to enter a segregated Jewish school. Her father lost his job as a professor. “All [within] a few hours, we had to change our life.”
Lionella emphasized the Jewish community’s last-ditch efforts to rally together and to help the poorest of the poor. When I asked about her rabbi’s reaction to the laws, she looked at me, the pain in her eyes palpable, and spoke softly: “Nathan Cassuto [the rabbi of the Great Synagogue in Florence] was deported because he wished to remain here with the Jews of Florence. He was taken and brought away.”
Then, Jewish families started to disappear. Realizing that they needed to protect themselves, Lionella’s family went into hiding in Arezzo, a Tuscan town near Florence. As I asked her about this experience, I found myself feeling flustered by the degree of suffering I was asking her to recall. How ridiculous my questions must have sounded as they came out of my mouth: What was it like to share a single room with your whole family and not be able to leave that room--for five years?
After the war, her family returned to Florence, only to find another family occupying their apartment. The family’s displacement and subsequent burden to find a new place for themselves in Florence—both physically and in the abstract—reifies the Florentine Jews’ unimaginable task of rebuilding their community. “We were alive, so we were happy…but there [were] no families. They completely disappeared.”
Hearing the realities of Lionella’s life during and after Jewish persecution under the Nazi regime, I felt crippled with guilt born from my comfort, privilege, and endless opportunity for Jewish engagement back in New York. I felt so distant from Lionella. And yet our similarities as Jewish women only served to magnify the inescapable: in a twist of fate, I could have been her and she, me.
But her story is not without positive memories. Lionella recalled the soldiers from the Jewish Brigade of the British Army, who came from Mandatory Palestine after the Liberation and “remained here [in Florence] for a few months to help the Jews, the children, to dance the hora, to teach Hebrew…They also married the Jewish girls from Florence…They were much loved. It was very important, the presence of these Jewish people from Eretz Israel.” Lionella ultimately met her husband, Giuseppe, another Italian Jew, at a Zionist meeting in Florence when they were in their twenties.
I thought back to my experience at Ruth’s, when I saw the soldiers outside the Synagogue. I asked Lionella how she felt seeing these soldiers every time she went to services. “Ah, before they were there, it was very dangerous, you could be killed. You have to thank them! They have been there for about thirty years, since 1982, after [an attack in] Rome…They are there to defend us, not to be against us.” What a shift that must have been for Lionella: during her childhood, she hid from Italian soldiers for fear of being murdered. Now she entrusts them with her life every time she goes to synagogue.
Once I heard Lionella’s story, it seemed to follow me wherever I went. And while Lionella told me of the stories of Jewish people in Italy during her lifetime, I, too, have born witness to the tenuous, complicated position of Jews in current day Italian society—forming my own collection of memories and reflections.
30,683...30,683...30,683. In disbelief of the magnitude, my Italian history professor repeated this number as we walked through the German World War II Military Cemetery just outside of Florence. He guided my class through the graves of 30,683 Nazi soldiers. He passed out flyers written by the German War Graves Commission, which explained that the graves serve as reminders of the horrors of war, and that we are among the graves of World War II “victims.” There was no mention of Jews in the pamphlet. I thought about the purpose of visiting cemeteries, which, generally speaking, is to pay respect to the dead and to honor their legacies. But here we stood, whitewashing the atrocities these soldiers committed, labeling them “victims,” and respectfully considering their lost lives. The more my professor repeated the number 30,683, the more I thought of a different number: 6 million.
In the Jewish Ghetto in Venice, the Chabad set up a massive sukkah. Approaching the structure--decked out in orange streamers and construction paper mobiles—a rabbi greeted me, wished me chag sameach [happy holiday], and invited me for dinner that evening. The reappropriation of the ghetto as a space for joy and celebration and life felt like a redemption.
Feeling adventurous, I took the train, alone, to Lucca for the day. A few stops before arriving, I noticed a huge swastika graffitied onto another train station. No one else seemed to notice. No one else seemed to care. My heart racing, I felt a strange sense of calm knowing that because of the way I look, I blend in with the local population. I had to wonder how Lionella would feel if she were sitting next to me on the train.
At one Chabad shabbat dinner, I was the only person, at a table of thirty, who couldn’t speak Hebrew. As the rabbi gave his Dvar Torah in Hebrew, I twiddled my thumbs, picking out the only words I could understand (countable on my fingers). This was the moment at which I wished I paid more attention in Hebrew school.
At the end of my visit with Lionella, I asked her what she hoped for the future of the Jews in Florence. Her response was simple: “To find a good Rav [rabbi], to have young people go more to synagogue, and to have a good teacher for the children. They have to know Hebrew better than they are learning now. I hope that will be better in the future.” If embarrassment over my inability to participate at the Chabad shabbat dinner wasn’t motivation enough to learn Hebrew, this certainly sufficed.
Annoyed about my train to Perugia’s delay, I paced back and forth around the Santa Maria Novella Train Station, a place that is, at this point, more familiar to me than Penn Station. Bored, my eyes wandered and landed on a plaque that almost blends into the busy station. The inconspicuous plaque on platform 16 marks the site where Jews of Florence were carted off to their deaths in concentration camps. Every year, millions walk on the battleground of such inexpressible brutality, hauntingly unaware of the site’s significance.
Yom Kippur in Italy meant eating a whole pesto pizza as my pre-fast meal and then a whole bowl of pasta as my post-fast meal.
Surrounded by staring Italian eyes, we—perfect strangers from all around the world—stood, holding onto one another in a nondescript Florentine park for Havdalah. Ushering in the sunset that marked the end of Yom Kippur, we sang the melodies that unite us as one people. With the thickly New York-accented rabbi leading, substituting coffee grinds for spices, and appealing to the congregation to email Netanyahu for an egalitarian prayer space at the Kotel, we prayed openly, loudly, and in all of our eccentricity. With the combination of American ex-pats, young study abroad students, and local Italian progressive Jews, this celebration felt like a fulfillment of Lionella’s hopes. Despite the far-from-ideal status of Jews within current Italian society, we proved the unwavering effort to build and to maintain community here.
\\JULIA CRAIN is a junior in Barnard College and a Contributing Writer for The Current. She can be reached at [email protected]. Photo courtesy of the Italian Jewish Archives.