Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

What do I know about Italy and Italians?

As a child, I was raised in the Bronx, in an Italian neighborhood where all the kids played stick ball and stoop ball. We had a lot more in common than stick ball. Our families were very much alike. My immigrant parents from Poland exchanged Borscht for Spaghetti with our immigrant Italian neighbors.

Jews and Italians enjoyed the uninhibited gesticulation of their hands and a great love of music. My Zayde played records of Caruso, after which he would always remark what a wonderful Cantor Caruso would have made.

There were things that we had in common: the centrality of the kitchen, the food which was the sacred center of our meetings, and most important, a great respect and love for mishpochah, la familia.

My barber in the neighborhood was Italian. And while the barber chair was my secular confessional booth, there was one subject which I avoided. I knew never to bring up the name of Mussolini. The axis allegiance of Italy and Germany was for me an anomaly. Forget treaties and pacts, Italy and Germany simply did not belong together. And in fact, they were profoundly different. As long as Fascist Italy remained independent, and up until Italy was occupied by Germany in 1943, not a single Jew was deported from Italy. And the Nazi government desperately sought to get their hands on Jews. The Italian government, its ministers, army leaders and diplomats schemed, plotted and resorted to the wiliest strategies to insure that no Jews under the Italian government fell into German hands. The Nazis were infuriated by what they called "the Italian attitude,” the refusal of Italy (and this is true of Finland Denmark and Bulgaria as well), to deport their Jews. Let it be known that Italy, Hitler's Axis ally deported not one Jew.

In April 1941, Germany, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria invaded and defeated poor Yugoslavia. The Axis powers dismembered Yugoslavia, established a Fascist Croatian state that included Bosnia and Herzgovina, under the fanatical nationalists, the Ustashe. The Ustashe's unbounded hatred of Serbia and of all foreign elements such as Jews and gypsies was unleashed. So swift and deadly was the Croatian round-up that by the end of 1941 two thirds of Croatia's Jews were dying in Croatian death camps.

Fortunately for the other Jews, Italy's forces were assigned to occupy a large sector of Greece and of Yugoslavia and of southeastern France including Nice, and kept military garrisons in Croatia.

Let the record show the Germans and the Vichy police busied themselves rounding up Jews for arrest and deportation. But the Italian Military and Foreign Ministries ordered a stop to arrest and deportation.

While in Amency, the collaborationist French police rounded up a trainload of Jews for deportation. But the Vichy police soon found themselves looking at the barrels of guns trained on them by soldiers of the Italian Fourth Army. The Vichy French were forced to release all the Jews.

In Nice, the Italian Commandante stationed Carabinieri outside the Jewish synagogue and centers to make certain that Vichy police could not enter to make arrests. When Vichy ordered Jews to wear yellow stars, the Italian generals quickly countermanded the order. As they put it, to force Jews to wear yellow stars was "inconsistent with the dignity of the Italian army.”

Ivo Herzer, an historian and himself one of the five thousand Croatian Jews, testifies to the Italian soldiers who freed Jews from trains headed for destruction. The Italian Carabinieri took the Jews to a town on the Adriatic ,coast which was then the headquarters of the Fifth Corps of the Italian Second Army. There, the Italian army lifted the curfew on public assembly so that the Jews could hold Yom Kippur services in a school room. Shortly before Christmas of 1941, Italian entertainers came to town to perform for the troops, and the Italians invited all Jewish refugees as guests of honor. Ivo Herzer reports that when the band struck up the Italian national anthem, he saw tears in his father's eyes. His father whispered to him, "If we survive the war we must never forget how the Italians saved Jews."

None of us should forget the Commander of the Italian Army in Croatia, General Mario Roatta. Supported by his staff and by senior officials in the foreign ministry, the Nazi's edicts were nullified.

Bending to relentless German pressure, the Italian Rescue Committee insisted that all the Jews be interned in camps in the Italian zone. The Jews feared that this was a preliminary step to their transfer to the Germans. Two Jewish internees committed suicide. General Roatta visited the Jews personally. He vowed that the Italian army would never deliver them to the Germans.  General Roatta flew to Rome and succeeded in changing Mussolini's mind about handing us over. The Jews were in an Italian car.

The Jews in the Italian camp could not believe their treatment by the Italians. Jews were assigned a building for social and religious activities, and an elementary high school. While Nazis were murdering thousands of Jewish children, the Italian army supplied Jewish children with text books. Under the Italian flag, Jewish children studied history and Latin, philosophy and mathematics. Later, this remarkable figure, General Mario Roatta, had all the Jewish refugees transferred to the island of Rab off the Dalmatian coast, which has been annexed by Italy because it was safer for the Jews.

Eighty-five percent of Italy's fifty thousand Jews were rescued from the clutches of the Nazis by Italian lay people, priests, nuns, farmers, soldiers, diplomats, generals. God bless the memory of Eduardo Focherini of the Bologna Catholic Daily Avveaire d'Italia, whose seven children died in the concentration camp because of their father's efforts on behalf of Jews. God bless the memory of Mother Superior Virginia Badetti, and Sister Emilian Benedetti,  in charge of the convent of the congregation of Our Lady of Sion, a Rome based order of nuns who hid, protected and saved 167 Jewish refugees. In this convent the door was never closed to all those who knocked on it to ask for help.

What can we learn from this part of the Holocaust, particularly in those somber days in the aftermath of the tragedies in Kosovo? What are we to teach our children?

1. There is and was an alternative to passive complicity with the killers. There was and always is an alternative to acquiescence to the predators, to the killers of life and of innocents. Even in the hell of the Holocaust, free will was exercised.
2. We must remember the evil because amnesia is a fateful disease. But we must not allow the evil memory to eclipse the evidence of human heroism and spiritual altruism; the goodness of men and women who lived out what the prophet Isaiah remembered as those who turned themselves into hiding places from the wind and converted themselves into shelters from the tempest.
3. We must remember these Christian heroes – chasidey umot haolam – who did not share with us the same theology or the same ritual. But their tears were the same, their compassion and love were the same. Blessed our brothers and sisters who transcended ethnicity and catechism.
4. We create memories for our children.

It is important for our children's memory that we never surrender our belief in the potential goodness of the human being, with the divine breath with which every individual was formed in the image of God.

We create the wisdom of faith for our children. Faith is a struggle against cynicism, against nihilism, against the claim that the whole of man is "nasty, brutish and short,” that beneath the veneer of civilization, there is nothing but venality, betrayal, brutality, cruelty. This night of gratitude and remembrance is an evening of faith; faith in the miraculous potentiality of goodness that lodges in the human breast.

This is an evening of faith in the altruism of people who number between 50 and 500 thousand, who said “no” to the killers of the dream. Tonight we raise up a mirror to see the divine image in ourselves. These men and women of flesh and blood we honor, cultivate and raise our spirits. They speak to us today. They inspire us today to protect the hunted, today to feed the hungry, today to shelter the homeless, today to give voice to the voiceless, today to turn our lives into hiding places; to see in the other not a racial color, to hear in the other not a foreign dialect but to know a human being, the trembling flesh of a frightened soul, a child of God.

This is an evening of self-discovery. Look deep into the eyes of the stranger and discover yourself. Look deep into the recesses of your soul and discover the trust for ourselves and our children. I am, you are, we are created in God's image. Therein is our hope for the world God means for us to inhabit.

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