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        © Photo: Daniele Vita |
 © Photo: Paola Savi |
Oltre i confini - ebrei e zingari - Press (With "Jews and Gipsies" on the second day of the Festival Negro di Pertosa)Moni Ovadia cilento.it - 27 august, 2010 It is Moni Ovadia who is the star of the second day of the Festival Negro, the ethnic music and culture celebration which is taking place at Pertosa, inside the Grotte dell'Angelo: today (27 August at 10 pm) the lights will shine upon the central stage of the event, for the show "Jews and Gipsies"...
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Oltre i confini - ebrei e zingari - Press
«With "Jews and Gipsies" on the second day of the Festival Negro di Pertosa» Moni Ovadia cilento.it - August, 27 2010 It is Moni Ovadia who is the star of the second day of the Festival Negro, the ethnic music and culture celebration which is taking place at Pertosa, inside the Grotte dell'Angelo: today (27 August at 10 pm) the lights will shine upon the central stage of the event, for the show "Jews and Gipsies"...
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Oltre i confini - ebrei e zingari - Text fragments (...) These are difficult times, we live in days of great confusion. Let us begin by saying that we are one-eyed as far as having an ethical and just attitude is concerned. We all know the meaning of the term "Shoah" today. Almost no one knows the term "Porraimos", the name given to the annihilation of the Gipsy people. I am amazed at the casual behaviour of some of our politicians, who very much like to be "nice" to the Jews: it costs nothing nowadays, on the contrary, you get prizes for it as if you had played the lottery. That is why from now on, I will judge a person as decent when they don't make a fake pilgramage to Auschwitz and say: "I can go there and rebuild my political virginity and when it's my turn, I can declare 'I am an Israeli'.".Bizarre. And legitimate, mind you, because Israel carries a part of the heritage of the Shoah, there's no arguing that. Many Jews who survived the Shoah founded the state of Israel, there's no doubt about it. But it's only a part, because Israel cannot represent the Romany and Sinto, it cannot represent the homosexuals, the handicapped, Jehovah's Witnesses or all those categories exterminated by the Nazis because they didn't fit their values. It probably can't even represent the entirety of diasporic Jews. Let us remember that 13 million people were exterminated in the Nazi death camps; of these, 6 million were Jews, 500.000 Romany and Sinto, while the rest were Slavs, anti-fascists, those who gave their life to save a Jew or a Gipsy, prostitutes and so on. It is of the utmost importance to understand that memory, if subservient to propaganda, is a devastation: if the Shoah loses its universal value, if it is not understood that in the Jew, the Gipsy, the homosexual, the cripple, the Nazis murdered man, fragile man, free man , the man capable of thought – and the Nazis were not partial to thinking but to obedience; thought is what they wanted to eradicate – then it all stops making sense. We must all begin to learn the word Porraimos very well, and we must also learn the existence of a place called Jasenovac, the death camp of the Croatian ustascias, where it is likely that tens of thousands of Serbs, Romany and Jews were murdered. A death camp which was the same in every way to the Nazi camps. We must remember all this if we want to have a true, deap memory, a fertile memory for the future of our children. (...)
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Oltre i confini - ebrei e zingari - Author's notes Jews and the "People of Men" have for centuries shared the same destiny.The trait they share and which has left its mark on their often tragic history – the fault of nations which tollerated them or persecuted them, a tragic history but, for merits of their own, still sublime - is the condition of being "other". The Jews and the "Men", for reasons both similar and specific to each, have for centuries incarnated a radical "otherness" with respect to the dominant cultures of the Christian West. The Jews because they refused the absolute truth of the Christ which was imposed by ecclesiastical powers. The "Men" because, although they had accepted Christ, they would not accept the life models and dominant conformism which were extraneous to their spirit of freedom. Nomadism was not always their vocation, but a response of dignity and independance to persecution. Both peoples were banned, with the exception of brief periods and with the consent of the powers erected by the majorities. Why? Their example might have become dangerous to tyrannical, verticistic, self-referential systems of power and control. But they were peoples in every way, by culture, tradition, spirituality, by deep structures of feeling, by inmediate emotional recognizability; peoples in every way, but with no borders, no bureaucracy, no army, no police, no patriotic rhetoric. Peoples, suspended between heaven and earth, overlapping borders and for this reason feared to the point of becoming phantoms capable of all iniquity, stigmatized as the essence of evil, then to be easily eliminated. From this perspective, it's not difficult to understand why this annihilation took place in the almost total indifference of the surrounding world. These two fraternal peoples shared a destiny for the longest time, but ever since the "Porraimos-Shoah" marked the culmination of their common tragedy, the People of Men has walked a path of solitary suffering. The Jewish people changed their history, conquered a homeland, and their status as victims of Nazi-fascism, their inmense ordeal, has been fully recognized and a testimonial and memorial edifice of great importance has been built on the Shoah; so, although the Jewish condition is still difficult or dangerous, we may say that the Jews have now entered society through the front door. Even the heirs of those who once persecuted them, now declare their friendship. But the People of Men often continue to suffer the ordeal of prejudice and marginalisation. Even today, it is a popular custom to discriminate, marginalise, persecute and beat the "Men", we can still burn their poor posessions, the police can still harrass and restrict them. The "Porraimos" has never been recognized, thanks to infamous bureaucratic quibbles, and the People of Men is still awaiting justice and respect. We Jews must be the first to raise our voice against the persecution of the Sinto and Romany, we must denounce the exhibition of frienship towards the Jews as wicked and perverse when it is used to legitimize the use of violence against our brothers the "Men" and any other minority, or any "other" people. "Jews and Gypsies" is our small but passionate contribution to the war against all racisms. "Beyond the borders- Jews and Gypsies" is a recital of songs, music and Romany, Sinto and Jewish stories, which resonate together with the shared vocation of the people of exile. A vocation born in remote times and which now, in times closer to us, becomes solitude and absence and requests a return, an acceptance, a passion which are an urgent and impossible to delay responsability. "Senza confini" (No borders) is our assumption of responsibility, its form being inscribed in music and the Civil theatre, representative and communicative forms of art which can and must unhinge all conformisms, petty reasonings and conveniences born from a logic of priviledge, so that the non-negotiability of liberty and dignity for every single human being and every people may be proclaimed. Moni Ovadia |
