CAMPO 34. Jewish Refugees in Puglia’s DP Camps

A conversation with Fabrizio Lelli about his work to preserve the documentation and memory of the Apulian DP camps. This event will be held in person and online.

Reservations is required:

Attendance in person: rsvp@primolevicenter.org

Attendance by Zoom: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/MgC0XP5WTvCqNIPP9Zzx9A

This program is presented in collaboration with the Leo Baeck Institute and the JDC Archive.

Santa Maria al Bagno was the largest DP camp in southern Italy, established at the end of 1943 when the first group of 500 refugees arrived in Puglia while war still raged in the rest of Italy and Europe. At its peak in early 1946, the camp housed 2,300 Jewish refugees and about 3,000 non-Jewish refugees. The camp was structured in four sites, and more than half of the refugees were lodged in summer houses requisitioned by the Allied forces. Many refugees left memories and photographs of the camp as a paradise of rebirth. According to a UNRRA report of 1946, the majority of the Jewish refugees had requested a visa for the United States. A series of complaints about the silence of the US Consulate suggests that these requests were for the most part rejected.  Conflicts were common among the Zionists, the religious groups, and secular Jews who wanted to either stay in Italy or obtain visas to the US. The camp also ended up serving as the administrative center for several illegal Jewish immigration operations to British Mandate Palestine. In the summer of 1946, the Italian government became increasingly hostile, placing restrictions on the new influx of refugees and on the permanence of those who were in the nearly 30 DP camps in the peninsula. The Southern Puglia camps formally closed in 1947, with an order to transfer to a DP camp in Rome the 600 Jewish refugees who had remained there. Prof. Lelli has helped create a memory archive on the camp and collaborates with the local Museum of Memory.

Image: Young refugees at Santa Maria al Bagno, from the photographic archive of Paolo Pisacane. Archivio di Stato di Lecce.

Fabrizio Lelli is Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature at “La Sapienza” University in Rome. His research mainly focuses on the philosophical and mystical literature of late Medieval and Early Modern Italian Jewish authors, and on the Southern Italian Apulian Jewish communities and their relationship with the Levant. He has published monographs, essays, and translations of Hebrew works composed by Yohanan Alemanno (c. 1434 – c. 1506), Elijah Hayyim of Genazzano (c. 1440 – c. 1510), Elijah Menahem Halfan (late 15th C. – c. 1541). He has edited monographs and collective volumes on the multiple intellectual identities of Apulian Jewish scholars. In recent years, while teaching at the University of Salento (Lecce), he has launched a project aimed at preserving the memory of the Jewish refugees in the United Nations DP (Displaced Persons) Transit Camps, which were operational in Southern Italy after WWII. He is Co-Founder and Director of the Jewish Museum in Lecce, Italy.