Honoring the Memory of Holocaust Victims at the Italian Cultural Institute of New York

Honoring the Memory of Holocaust Victims at the Italian Cultural Institute of NY

By Ron Spence, ICI NY Press Office Staff

As a kid growing up in Brooklyn in the 1980s I used to visit my grandmother Josephine, a proud Italian-American whose parents Michele Rizzo and Teresa DiBuono emigrated at the turn of the 20^th century to New York City from the mountain village of Rutino, after school for home-made Italian cooking. The street where she lived and which shaped my early years as a Brooklynite, 17th Street, was a melting pot of hard working primarily blue-collar immigrant families.  It was a street in which neighbors treated neighbors like family regardless of ethnic or religious differences.

One of my grandmother’s neighbors, Henry Dorzinski, was a Polish immigrant and a gentle soul who helped neighbors with house repairs. While I primarily remember Henry as a soft spoken kind man who always wore handyman attire of jeans and a white t-shirt, always took care of his garden, and allowed my sister and I to play with his Pomeranian dogs Fifi and Baron, the indelible image of Henry that has been seared into my memory was of a tattoo he had on his arm- or what at the time I thought was a tattoo. It wasn’t until years later that I learned from my family what it really was- a barcode of his imprisonment number form his time in a Nazi concentration camp. Looking back on it 20 years after he passed I cannot imagine the harrowing experiences he must have gone through during that terrible time. The pure evil of the Holocaust knew no bounds. Millions of innocent people were murdered out of hate, the false science of eugenics, and countless other indefensible excuses. The aftereffects of the Holocaust impacted millions of survivors across the globe and families from all different backgrounds across neighborhoods in New York City, including my grandmother’s.

To continue the important study of the Holocaust, the Italian Cultural Institute of New York will coordinate a series of symposiums from January 27^th-30^th on the Nazi and fascist persecution of the Italian Jewish community and other Italians victimized. The events include:

·         Friday January 27^th Remembrance Ceremony:  The Consul General of Italy, Hon. Natalia Quintavalle is renewing her predecessors’ commitment to preserve the memory of the victims of Nazi-Fascist persecution. The Consulate, in collaboration with Centro Primo Levi, is organizing the ceremony of the reading of the names of all Jews deported from Italy and Italian territories. This reading is the centerpiece in a series of events presenting and informing on the history of totalitarianism and raising awareness against racism and xenophobia. Giorno della Memoria is held under the auspices of the Consulate General of Italy in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute, the Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimo’ at NYU, the John D. Calandra Institute at CUNY, the Italian Academy at Columbia University and the Scuola d’Italia “G. Marconi,” and RAI Corporation. Time: 9:00 AM – 3:00 PM. Location: Consulate General of Italy, 690 Park Avenue (between 68^th Street and 69^th Street), New York, NY.

·         Sunday January 29^th Forging the ‘New Man’: A conversation with Francesco Cassata (University of Genoa) which will analyze the development of eugenics in Italy, from the First International Congress of Eugenics in London (1912) to the establishment of medical genetics during the 1950s. Dr. Cassata will expose the complex interaction between eugenics and “racial science” during Fascism, focusing in particular on the definition of an alternative model of neo-Lamarckian, pronatalist and Catholic eugenics: the so-called “Latin” eugenics. Starting with the institutionalization of Italian eugenics in the early 1900's, Cassata will trace the participation of the Italian scientific community in defining biological racism and a skewed notion of “fitness” that became central to the fascist regime's juridical, social and ideological system. Time: 2:30 PM. Location: Museum of Jewish Heritage, 36 Battery Park Place, New York, NY.

·         Monday January 30^th The World Premiere of the documentary “DP Camp of Cinecitta”: A documentary film by Marco Bertozzi based on research by Noa Steimatsky. The conversion of Cinecittà, one of Europe’s largest movie studios, into a refugee camp is the topic of this thoroughly researched film. The camp of Cinecittà emerges as a startling phenomenon and a prime allegorical tableau of its time. The film explores the historical conditions at the time of the camp’s creation, the magnitude of its population, the duration of its existence and the broader social and political forces that governed its development. Time: 6:00 PM. Location: NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimo' 24 West 12th Street (between 5^th Avenue and Avenue of the Americas), New York, NY.