Drowning of Roma girls brings racism to surface – The Irish Times – Wed, Jul 23, 2008

Quoted from http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2008/0723/1216740956880.html:

Drowning of Roma girls brings racism to surface – The Irish Times – Wed, Jul 23, 2008

PADDY AGNEW in Rome

ITALY: FOR MONTHS now, the city of Naples has earned itself less than flattering headlines because of its much-publicised rubbish crisis. According to Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe of Naples, however, the city managed to show an even uglier face to the world last weekend when two Roma gypsy children drowned off the beach of Torregaveta, near Naples.

Eleven-year-old Cristina Ebrehemovich and her 12-year-old sister Violetta lived in the nomad encampment of Secondigliano, one of more than 1,000 illegal – and squalid – favelas or shanty towns that have grown up near Rome, Milan and Naples. Last Saturday, the two children were sent out to sell trinkets, cigarette lighters and other objects at the Torregaveta beach, easily reachable by suburban train.

Given the hot day that was in it, the children opted to take a swim. Perhaps because they had eaten, and almost certainly because they did not know how to swim, the two children soon got into difficulties in the choppy sea.

Emergency services and lifeguards from a nearby private beach were alerted but they were unable to save the two, whose drowned bodies were thrown back up by the rough sea.

It was what happened next that aroused the indignation of many, including Cardinal Sepe. As the two bodies were laid out on the sand, covered by beach towels, until such time as police authorities removed them, other beach-goers continued to sit on, taking the sun in apparent indifference.

Newspaper pictures show couples sitting in deck chairs or sunning themselves close to the rocks as the bodies first lie on the sand and are then removed in coffins: “The sadness comes not just from seeing those two bodies stretched out under the covers on the sand, but also from the sight of those on the beach sitting idly by and not feeling in any way involved. Sometimes, looking the other way and doing your own business can be worse than the events themselves,” said Cardinal Sepe.

While Franco Iannuzzi, mayor of nearby Monte di Procida, argued yesterday that many of those on the beach had done all they could to save the children, commentators pointed out that the drownings come at a very particular moment.

Just last month, the newly installed centre-right government of Silvio Berlusconi announced the ministry of the interior would carry out a census, complete with finger-printing, of the inhabitants of nomad camps.

Interior minister Roberto Maroni, of the Northern League, claims the measure will help to provide both health and education services to the Roma. Critics see it as a racist move aimed at combating communities held responsible by many Italians for petty theft, burglary and violent crime.

The Roma problem is complicated by the fact many Italians confuse them with Romanians, who have continued to pour into Italy. The law and order issue played heavily both in the spring general election and in mayoral elections in cities such as Rome with centre-right candidates calling for the destruction of nomad camps, identified as hotbeds of crime.

© 2008 The Irish Times

Does a ‘certain Jewish something’ really set Jews apart?

Quoted from:  The Jerusalem Post

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1218095193381&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFullby Ruth Ellen Gruber/JTA

I learned a new word this summer – “allosemitism.”

Coined by a Polish-Jewish literary critic named Artur Sandauer, the term describes a concept with which I am quite familiar – the idea of Jews as the perpetual “other.”

Allosemitism can embrace both positive and negative feelings toward Jews – everything, as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman put it, “from love and respect to outright condemnation and genocidal hatred.”

At root is the idea that, good or bad, Jews are different from the non-Jewish mainstream and thus unable to be dealt with in the same way or measured by the same yardstick.

The word cropped up during a recent symposium on Jewish and Roma (Gypsy) cultures that I attended here as part of a project called, significantly, “The Other Europeans.”

It was gratifying to find a term that so aptly describes the ambivalent ways in which Jews are regarded. And it was amazing to me that I hadn’t come across it earlier, considering all my reading and writing on the subject, not to mention my experiences over the past decades as a Jew in Europe.

We all know about anti-Semitism and the historic demonization of Jews. But anti-Semitism can be counterbalanced by an idealization of Jews and Jewish culture that also can be divorced from reality.

“People who think Jews are smarter than everyone else don’t have Jewish relatives,” my brother Frank likes to quip.

The Other Europeans project examines some of these issues by focusing on the relationships between Jewish and Roma cultures, particularly in the realm of music.

The project statement doesn’t use the term “allosemitism.” Instead it describes Jews and Roma as having “transcultural” European identities “in both fact and imagination.”

This, it states, has led to the condemnation of both groups as “rootless,” “parasitic,” “degenerate” and worse, as well as to continuing anti-Semitic and anti-Roma outbursts. At the same time, it notes, “the same transcultural character of Yiddish and Roma music is romanticized and embraced by contemporary ‘world music’ pop culture, which frames it as subversive and transgressive and therefore ‘hip.’ “

The Other Europeans project is the brainchild of the musician Alan Bern, an American who has been based in Berlin since the 1980s.

It is sponsored by three Jewish culture festivals — the Weimar Yiddish Summer Weeks, which Bern directs; the annual Festival of Jewish Culture in Krakow, Poland, which this year marked its 20th anniversary; and the KlezMORE Jewish Music Festival in Vienna.

All three present and teach Jewish music and culture to a predominantly non-Jewish public.
Bern, a key figure in the klezmer music revival over the past two decades, is a thoughtful observer of the sometimes uneasy cultural dynamics between Jews and non-Jews in Europe.

“You define culture through interactions,” he told me during one of our many conversations. “What defines something is often the point of view from which you regard it.”

How to define what is “Jewish” provides endless fodder for debate in post-Holocaust, post-communist Europe. Jews are few here now; Jewish communal life, though reviving in some places, is in flux; and Jewish cultural expression is often embraced or even perpetrated by non-Jews.

Strict halachic definition may suffice for the religiously observant. But for Jews and non-Jews alike, that has always told only part of the story. And indeed, as experienced so drastically in the Shoah, definitions of what, or who, is Jewish often come from the outside.

Is there, as the concept of allosemitism implies, a “certain Jewish something” that does so set Jews apart?

The Jewish Museum in Munich has mounted an exhibit this summer actually called “That Certain Jewish Something.” It takes a creative and rather provocative approach to explore the intangibles that can imbue objects, situations and even individuals with a sense of Jewishness.

The museum called on the public to bring in an object the people felt had “a certain Jewish something” about it with a written statement about why they had chosen that item. More than 120 people, most of them non-Jewish or with only distant Jewish roots, answered the call. All the objects were delivered on one day, June 22, and then arranged in display cases with the stories behind them.

The resulting, wide-ranging collection, as the museum puts it, provides “a multifaceted view into a very personal and modern picture of Judaism.” Some of the objects are explicitly Jewish:
menorahs, an old container for matzah, kitschy shtetl figurines, family silverware marked for meat and dairy, a Ten Commandments paperweight, a comic book called “Shaloman.”

But for many of the items – a flashlight, a rock, a tablecloth, a necklace, books, paintings, an ordinary pair of sneakers – “that certain Jewish something” is revealed only through their meaning to those who selected them.

A set of faded snapshots shows a smiling, bespectacled fellow attending a party in a Mexican costume. The man who brought them in had found the snaps when he moved into a new apartment, and they apparently showed the previous tenant, a Jewish man who had passed away.

An 11-year-old boy brought in a shirt from the Bayern-Munich football team because he had read that the team’s president before World War II had been a Jew.

The ordinary pair of sneakers belonged to a Jewish man. They in fact are a tangible symbol of the force of his faith: He wears them to the synagogue on Yom Kippur, he wrote, as they are made of cloth, not leather, which is prohibited on the holiday.

That allosemitic, “certain Jewish something” is in what they represent, or how they are represented, not in what they actually are.

First Ever National Gypsy Travller History Month

Quoted from http://media-newswire.com/release_1069698.html:

First ever national Gypsy Roma Traveller History Month.

(Media-Newswire.com) – Members of the Traveller community from Lancaster have celebrated the first ever national Gypsy Roma Traveller History Month.

The month was marked with an evening exhibition at Skerton Learning Centre organised by Lancashire County Council’s Traveller Education Service and the Adult College.

Britain’s 300,000 Gypsies, Roma and Travellers have lived, worked and travelled throughout Britain for over 500 years, yet are rarely mentioned in British history.

This year, Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities across the country joined forces with central government backing to celebrate their rich history, culture and contribution to Britain’s past and future.

Displays of work produced by local Travellers included arts and crafts by the Traveller Family Learning Group during courses run by the Adult College, which had also held taster sessions for the Traveller community on family history, reminiscence work and digital photography.

Lancaster Traveller Youth Group, Lancashire Young People’s Service and The Dukes DT3 held a photography exhibition featuring images of today’s young Travellers.

NCBI Lancashire’s Welcome Stories Project worked with the Traveller Youth Group to record their stories and experiences of living in the district and displayed the booklet, CD and posters produced by the project.

One of the youngest participants was four-year-old Joseph Doran, who won first prize in the pre-school category of the GRTHM Poster Competition which was launched in the House of Lords in February.

There were thousands of entries so it was a real achievement that Joseph, from Kingsway Playgroup in Heysham, won a first prize and Lancaster Traveller Youth Group won a runner-up prize.

Joseph was unable to travel to the House of Lords to receive his £100 prize in June as his family were at the horse fair in Appleby, so he was presented with it at the evening by special guest the mayor of Lancaster, Keith Budden.

Eileen Mullervy, team leader for the Traveller Education Service, said: “Lancaster and Morecambe Travellers and friends certainly made the first ever Gypsy Roma Traveller History Month in 2008 a month to remember and I am sure it is an event to go on from strength to strength next year.”

EJP | News | Jewish group urges Bulgarian president to withdraw prize to alleged anti-gypsy

Quoted from http://www.ejpress.org/article/news/28900:

 

Samuels quoted excerpts of articles where Kalin Rumenov (picture) compared the gypsies to “cattle” and said they were “multiplying like sheep.”

 

A statement from the Jewish human rights organisation’s director for international relations, Shimon Samuels, protested the country’s choice of recipient for its 2008 Chernorizetz Hrabar journalistic award. “The laureate, Kalin Rumenov, is reported to have written racist articles on a regular basis, attacking the Roma Gypsy community in the national newspaper Novinar,” Samuels said, urging President Georgy Parvanov to withdraw the prize. The newspaper was not immediately available to comment but Samuels quoted excerpts of articles where Rumenov compared the gypsies to “cattle” and said they were “multiplying like sheep.” “This language is so redolent of the 1930s and 1940s when both Jews and Gypsies were marked for Nazi extermination,” Samuels said. The award was received by Kalin Rumenov at an official ceremony in Sofia in Mayin the presence of leading politicians, members of Parliament and journalists. SeveralBulgarian professional groups set up a petition for the prize to be publicly withdrawn, calling onthe President and the Prime Minister of Bulgaria, who were present at the ceremony, to make a public declaration that they do not share the values represented by the racist author. An estimated 700,000 gypsies or Roma live in Bulgaria, forming nine percent of the country’s population. The community is poverty-ridden and isolated in ghettos, largely illiterate and often discriminated.

AKI – Adnkronos international Italy: Gypsy camp set on fire in Rome

Quoted from http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Security/?id=1.0.2359723925:

Italy: Gypsy camp set on fire in Rome

AKI – Adnkronos international Italy: Gypsy camp set on fire inRome

Rome, 23 July (AKI) – Firefighters and police in the Italian capital Rome began investigating an attack on a Rome Gypsy camp in the city early on Wednesday.

The camp was set on fire by unknown assailants late on Tuesday. It is believe that the fire was started by young Italians.

The camp, called the Via Candoni camp, is considered a ‘legal’ camp and is located in the southwestern part of Rome.

Witnesses said a group of young Italians aboard three cars threw incendiary devices, and the fire quickly spread throughout the camp, reported Italian daily Corriere della Sera.

"We will bring to light what happened. If there is someone responsible for this, they will be severely punished," said Rome’s mayor Gianni Alemanno, who visited the camp after the attack.

This attack on a Roma Gypsy camp comes a day after Italian authorities carried out the so-called ‘census’ in the camp to identify who lives there.

Italy’s Interior Minister Roberto Maroni said last week that he would go ahead with the controversial ‘census’, which involves fingerprinting Roma Gypsies in Italy.

The procedure is already underway in Naples, Milan and Rome, despite criticism from international rights groups and the European Union.

In May, an Italian mob twice carried out arson attacks against a Gypsy camp outside the southern Italian city of Naples – incidents that drew criticism from rights groups, members of the Catholic church in Italy and the opposition.

The census of Italy’s Gypsy population is part of the new Italian conservative government’s promise to crackdown on illegal immigration.

Special Roma Gypsy commissioners have been appointed in several of the country’s major cities.

Of the approximately 150,000 Roma-Gypsies in the country, 70,000 are Italian citizens, and many others come from European Union countries such as Romania, while others came from the countries that make up the former Yugoslavia.