A while back I wrote about a project that I became involved in with the consul general of Italy, Gianni Bardini. It was Bardini who told me how impressed he was by the close relationship that our two communities have developed here in Toronto. He was moved to tears when he heard the story of Miriam Frankel, a young Italian Jewish girl from the city of Trieste who was deported to Auschwitz.
It was these events that led Bardini to wish to do something to commemorate, on an ongoing basis, the warm, cordial and mutually beneficial relationship between the Jewish and Italian communities. As president of the Canadian Institute for Mediterranean Studies, I have been fortunate enough to become the facilitator of this exciting venture. The participants include Amir Gissin, consul general of Israel in Toronto; the Canadian Jewish Congress and UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, as well as the Goggio Chair of Italian Studies, located at St. Michael’s College at University of Toronto.
As the opening salvo in our project, we are bringing in Edward Goldberg, the founder of the Medici Archive Project, the Italian equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Cairo Genizah combined. (The Cairo Genizah is a collection of almost 280,000 Jewish manuscript fragments found in the genizah, or storeroom, of Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, now Old Cairo, Egypt.) The Medici Archive Project is a treasure-trove of information about the Renaissance.
It was the Medici family who, as merchant princes and patrons of the arts, played a pivotal role in this great age. The archives contain more than a million documents, of which, amazingly, 60,000 deal with the Jews of Tuscany. I thought that highlighting our work together in one of the great ages of the past would be a wonderful way to introduce our project. (Goldberg speaks at 6:30 p.m. on April 27 at the Italian Cultural Institute, 420 Huron St. )
Gissin was the one who came up with a contemporary event to promote our project. He has arranged for a basketball game between the national teams of Israel and Italy to be held at the Air Canada Centre.
Despite these two wonderful events, we still did not have something that we could support on an ongoing basis to commemorate the friendship of our two communities. At our meetings, we were unable to come up with an ongoing project worthy of our support. Then, out of the blue, I received an e-mail from Michael Chazan, the director of the Archaeology Centre at U of T.
Chazan asked for my help in getting U of T involved in an archeological excavation in Israel. Then the name of an archeological site hit me – this is exactly what we had been looking for. It’s called Tel Huqoq and dates to the Roman period, has a synagogue and is mentioned in the Christian Bible.
Bardini was as excited as I was about the idea. When we met with Gissin, he shared our enthusiasm and offered his hearty endorsement. It’s great to know that I had hit a home run. We now need assistance in helping to raise the necessary funds.