Alexis Herr Every age needs its heroes, so it seems. And in post-war Italy, a low level official named Giovanni Palatucci seemed to fit the bill. But recent reports challenge Palatucci’s legacy as the “Italian Schindler” and in so doing…
Patricia Cohen. He has been called the Italian Schindler, credited with helping to save 5,000 Jews during the Holocaust. Giovanni Palatucci, a wartime police official, has been honored in Israel, in New York and in Italy, where squares and promenades…
Anita Kantrowitz It’s a foggy fall morning, and standing atop Mount Cardeto on the east coast of central Italy, I can barely make out the deep blue of the Adriatic Sea. As I look out toward the cliff’s edge, what…
Elin Shoen Brockman. When Natalia Indrimi talks about “cultural translation” she means it in the broadest sense imaginable. The Centro Primo Levi, of which she is executive director and one of the founders, is now in its 10th year of…
Suzanne Ruta, The Forward The first time I saw Wendy Gittler, she was carrying her husband, Henry Tylbor, in his wheelchair down a narrow, crowded flight of stairs at the New York Studio School, on East 8th Street in…
Susannah Gold Thanks to Centro Primo Levi, on Sunday, May 22, the choir from the Tempio Maggiore – the Synagogue of Rome – came to New York City to perform a number of special works for the first time. The…
George Robinson When it was home to the greatest empire the world had yet known, it was said that all roads led to Rome. To build that empire meant sending the city’s sons across much of the known world, yet…
Paul Vitello. Italians took everything from Ursula Korn Selig’s family during World War II, including a hotel the family owned on the Riviera and the money they carried after fleeing Germany’s persecution of Jews in 1938. Italians also saved…
Paul Vitello. As they have for the past four years, prominent people and passers-by joined together outside New York’s Italian Consulate on Wednesday to take turns reading the names of 8,600 Jews rounded up in Italy between 1938 and 1945,…
Lies Leibovitz. Like the majority of those who grow up in Muslim countries, Boualem Sansal didn’t think about the Holocaust much. It just wasn’t an issue in his native Algeria, and when it came up, it was presented more as…
