Saturday 27 January is the Holocaust Remembrance Day, established by law on 20 July 2000 by the Italian Parliament, which adhered to the international proposal to declare 27 January a day of commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust during the Second World War. To celebrate the anniversary, the Municipality of Pisa, in collaboration with the Prefecture, the Province of Pisa and the Jewish Community of Pisa, has organised a significant programme of initiatives that will take place starting on Thursday 25 January.
PROGRAMME:
On Thursday 25 January, at 9.00 a.m. and 10.30 a.m., pupils from Scuola Secondaria di I grado "G. Mazzini" will meet representatives of ANED - Associazione Nazionale Ex Deportati. At 10.00 a.m. at Scuola Secondaria di I grado "V. Galilei" there will be a presidium of Kindness for Peace. At 9.15 p.m. at Teatro Verdi Sala Titta Ruffo will be held the Concert for the Memory Annelies by James Whitbourn. The concert is organised by the Pisa Chorale with the contribution of the Municipality of Pisa, and sponsored by CISE (Centro Interdipartimentale di Studi Ebraici). It will be presented by musicologist Alessandro Cecchi (Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics).
From 25 January to 5 February, Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Saturday from 10.30 a.m. to 7 p.m., the Biblioteca Comunale di Pisa will host the documentary exhibition 'Noi, i persitati: la memoria degli oppressi dal Nazifascismo' (We, the persecuted: the memory of those oppressed by Nazism) organised by the Bibliolandia Network. The exhibition will be inaugurated on Thursday 25 January at 11 a.m.
On Friday 26 January, at 10 a.m., a laurel wreath will be laid in Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II at the 'Mai più reticolati' monument in front of the Palazzo della Provincia. At 11.30 a.m., at the Raffaello Menasci green area, there will be a ceremony to change the name 'from Via D'Achiardi to Via Giusti tra le Nazioni'. A number of musical pieces will be performed by the 'Leonardo Fibonacci' Comprehensive Institute Choir, with the participation of pupils from the Primary and First Grade Secondary Schools of the same institute. The city authorities will take part in the event. The sketch of a commemorative stele by artist Andrea D'Aurizio will also be presented.
At 3.00 p.m., in the Aula Magna of the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, there will be a screening of the film 'Vite sospese, dal buio alla luce' (Suspended lives, from darkness to light) by the Scuola Normale Superiore and Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna.
On Saturday 27 January, at 10:30 a.m. at the Biblioteca Comunale di Pisa there will be a screening for schools of the animated film "Anne Frank and the Secret Diary" by Ari Folman. At 11:30 a.m. instead, there will be a gathering in Piazza San Paolo all'Orto in front of the Stones of Stumbling, in adherence to the national initiative.
On Wednesday 31 January, at 10 a.m., pupils from the "G. Mazzini" Secondary School will meet representatives of ANED - Associazione Nazionale Ex Deportati.
Other initiatives scheduled:
Annelies - Concert for Holocaust Remembrance Day
Annelies is a musical work for instruments, choir and soprano soloist, created by the British composer James Whitbourn, which transposes into music the famous diary of Anne Frank (whose full name was Annelies). Annelies was first performed at the National UK Holocaust Remembrance Day in Westminster Hall, London, on 27 January 2005, while the world premiere took place in April 2005 at Cadogan Hall in London, Conducted by Leonard Slatkin with the Clare College Cambridge Choir and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. The version that will be performed in Pisa on January 25, introduced by the musicologist Alessandro Cecchi (Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics, UniPi), presents the work in the form for choir, soprano and 4 instruments (clarinet, violin, cello and piano)which gives the composition a greater intimacy and suggestion, and which is more easily adaptable to small spaces.
The concert retraces the moving challenge of Anna, who in her diary, day after day, tells the fears, hopes, courage and resistance of her Jewish child forced into hiding and deportation. The original text of Anne’s diary was reworked by writer Melanie Challenger, becoming the libretto for Whitbourn’s opera. In the event presented here, the reading of the prose pieces of the Challenger not sung is entrusted to the famous voice actor Carlo Valli. Pervaded by a poignant vulnerability and an unsustainable emotional intensity, the music that accompanies the lyrics features the bells of the Westerkerk, echoes of radio broadcasts of the time filtering from the other apartments and a number of elements of Anna’s Jewish and German culture.
The Times described the work as «a score that finds its greatest strengths in a deep respect and an absolute lack of rhetoric». The celebration for the Holocaust Remembrance Day through a composition that has transposed into music the literary work that is the real symbol of the Shoah, manifests the intent to present to the contemporary public a work of high artistic and moral value, in what for Pisa is a real "first staging".
Free admission with compulsory reservation (www.eventbrite.it – info 050 94 1111)
Memories of a family, memory of a city
27 January at 11.30, Auditorium of Palazzo Blu
A conversation with several voices about how the memories and private memories of the families whose members were among the expelled from the University of Pisa because of the racial laws in 1938 contributed to the establishment of an active memory in the city, as a process that defines its urban and civil dimension.
Speakers
Adriana Nannicini President ANPI Section of Pisa
Vera Paggi author of the book "The Alley of Unleavened"
Fabrizio Franceschini CISE Interdepartmental Center for Jewish Studies "Michele Luzzati"
Michele Emdin
Bruno Possenti President ANPI Provincial of Pisa
ANPI section of Pisa invites towns and citizens to the meeting
Info and Contacts:
050.916950 info@palazzoblu.it
