The Jewish Community of Rome

Benjamin Ben Abraham Anav (1215-1295), poet, born in Rome, Italy. He studied with poet Meir Ben Moses and Joab, Daniel and Isaac of Camerino. His main interest was the halakhah, but he had a thorough knowledge of mathematics and astronomy. Benjamin Anav began to write poetry in 1239. It includes kinot and selihot, the themes of which are historical. Many of his selihot were included in the mahzor of the Italian rite. He died in Rome, Italy.

Judah Ben Benjamin Ha-Rofe Anav (13th century), poet, born in Rome, Italy. He studied with poet Meir Ben Moses. In 1239, on the occasion of Nicolas Donin’s denunciation of the Talmud, he wrote the piyyut El Mi Anusah le-Ezrah ("To Whom Shall I Run For Help". He died in Rome, Italy.

Crescenzo Del Monte (1868-1935), poet, born in Rome, Italy. He first wrote sonnets in Romanesco (a Roman dialect) and later, after the Jewish emancipation of 1870, wrote in the Judeo-Italian dialect in order to preserve the special language and folklore.
Del Monte’s poems about the Roman ghetto describe its everyday life in a vital and expressive way. His love for the dialect led him to philological investigations and he constructed the grammar of the dialect. His poems were published in two volumes entitled Sonetti Guidaico-Romaneschi (1927) and Nuovi sonetti Guidaןco-Romaneschi (1933). A third volume was published posthumously, in 1955. He died in Rome, Italy.

Enzo Hayim Sereni (1905-1944), Zionist, born in Rome, Italy. He received his doctorate at the university of Rome in 1924 by which time he was deeply involved in Zionist work among Italian Jewry. In 1926 he moved to the Land of Israel where he worked on farms, was an organizer in the labor movement and a founder of kibbutz Givat Brenner. He was often sent on Zionist missions to Europe and was in Germany 1931-1934, helping to transfer Jewish assets from Germany to the Land of Israel. During WW II Sereni was an emissary in Egypt, Greece, Iraq and Italy. In his last mission he was parachuted into Italy as a British army officer, captured by the Germans and sent to Dachau concentration camp where he died. The kibbutz Netser Sereni is named for him.

Mose Di Segni (1903-1969), doctor, partisan, born in Rome, Italy, to a local Jewish family. He studied medicine in Rome and went on to specialize in pediatrics in Florence. He took part in the Zionist activities organized by Enzo Sereni (a Zionist leader in Italy, co-founder of kibbutz Givat Brenner who was parachuted into Nazi-occupied Italy in World War II, captured by the Germans and subsequently executed in Dachau). In 1930 Di Segni met his future wife, Pina, who had studied pharmacy in Florence and who was the daughter of Rabbi Naftali Roth rabbi of Russe (Ruschuk) in Bulgaria.

In 1936 Di Segni was drafted into the Italian army and sent to Spain as a doctor attached to the the Italian Red Cross delegation in the Civil War. After the passing of the Italian racial laws of 1938, he was dismissed and returned to Italy. In addition he was dismissed from his position in the Rome hospital where he had previously worked. He found himself under the regular surveillance of the fascist secret police on account of his association with the Jewish community and due to his Zionist and anti-fascist views.

In September 1943 Di Segni was designated as one of the Jews to be taken hostage to ensure that the Jewish community of Rome would pay the ransom of 50 kilograms of gold imposed after the German takeover of Italy. Di Segni received advance warning from the deputy editor of the newspaper “Il Giornale d'Italia”, where he worked during his university studies. So he fled from Rome with his wife and two small children to San Severino, a small city in central Italy and was hidden there by a friend. Di Segni joined a large partisan group which, for ten months until the defeat o the Germans, engaged in operations to sabotage German transport and communications, to protecting the civilian population, and to sabotage efforts to conscript local people into the Fascist army. Moshe Di Segni was the senior medical officer of the group and participated in many of these actions. One of the battles in which he took part was the Battle of Valdiola in March 1944 and for his actions he was awarded a silver medal for heroism in battle. In addition, he gave medical aid to the civilian population throughout the region.

After the liberation of San Severino he returned to his work as a doctor in Rome. He remained active in Jewish organizations in Rome and was a member of the Jewish community until 1965.

In 1996 the ceremonies in San Severino to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Italian Republic were dedicated to the memory of Dr. Di Segni and in 2011 his three children were given honorary citizenship of the town. A book has been published about his activities as a partisan.

His son Ricardo, also a doctor by profession, has been Chief Rabbi of Rome since 2002. His eldest daughter, Frida, a pharmacist, lives in Ancona while another son, Elio, a cardiologist, immigrated to Israel in 1974.

ehiel ben Jekuthiel Benjamin Anav (13th century), poet, born in Rome, Italy. He is the author of a major work first entitled Beit Middot (Constantinople, 1312) and later Ma’alot ha-Middot (Cremona, 1356). The book deals with ethical conduct, based on talmudic, midrashic and other sources and begins and ends with a poem. Another poem by Jehiel Anav can be found at the end of the Jerusalem Talmud that he copied. It is a lamentation on the destruction of 21 Torah scrolls in a fire that broke out in Trastevere in Rome. Jehiel Anav died in Rome, Italy.

Sergio Piperno (1906-1976), jurist and community leader, President of the Union of Jewish Communities of Italy, born in Rome, Italy, into a family well integrated into the Jewish community. In 1967 he added to his family name, Piperno, the name  “Be’er”, in memory of his  great-great grandfather, Moshe Shabbatai Be’er, who served as Chief Rabbi of Rome until 1834. 

Piperno graduated in law in 1930. He started his career as a justice, working in Cavarzere and Dolo (near Venice) and then in Milan, where he was Public Prosecutor (Procuratore del Re). While serving in this capacity, the Fascist racial laws (1938), that excluded Jews from all public positions, went into effect. Piperno was deply affected on a personal level, because he could not believe that Italy, which he had served loyally, would exclude him just because he was Jewish.

Having lost the job he was prepared for, he became a sales agent for small firms. In the meantime, he began to be engaged in activities linked to the Jewish community, like the Delasem (Delegazione per l’Assistenza agli Emigranti Ebrei, active between 1939 and 1947).

On September 8, 1943 Rome was occupied by the Nazis; on October 16, 1943 there was a mass raid during which some 1,000 Jews were artrested. Piperno managed to escape and then succeeded in getting a fake identity card under the name of Enrico Marini, a displaced person from the South of Italy, then already under the control of the Allied forces.  Piperno changed his look (wearing glasses and growing  moustache) and went into hiding with his family in another area of Rome where hardly anybody could recognize him, staying there until the liberation by the Allied forces on June 4, 1944.

In the new Italy, which had become a repubblic in 1946, Piperno was reintegrated in his previous career as a judge, and eventually he reached a top level position, being appointed to the Supreme Court in 1969.

At the same time he continued with his engagement with the Jewish Community: he was elected member of the Board of the Jewish Community of Rome soon after the liberation; he was one of the promoters of Italian ORT in 1946 and was active in the Keren Hayesod when he was posted to Turin, as a judge of the Court of Appeal (1953). As representative of Keren Hayesod he took part in the Congress of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCII) in 1956, and was elected as member of the board, and then as President. He was reelected in the next four Congresses and remained in this position for 20 years, until his death, on June 5, 1976.

During his presidency Sergio Piperno maintained good relationships with leading Italian politicians, such as the Italian President Giuseppe Saragat and Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. He also started new relations with the Vatican, where Pope John XXIII had agreed to eliminate the words perfidi giudei ("perfidous Jews") from Good Friday’s prayers of the Catholic Church. This was the beginning of a new approach in the Jewish-Catholics relations which eventually led to the decree Nostra Aetate by the Second Vatican Council (1965). Piperno was often consulted by Cardinal Agostino Bea who wrote the initial draft of the decree.

Bearing in mind the need not to forgive what happened during 1938-1945, Piperno promoted the historical monograph Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo ("History of Italian Jews under Fascism", 1962) by Prof. Renzo De Felice, which became the basis for understand the fate of the Italian Jews during the Holocaust. He also was instrumental in the establishment of the Centro di Documentazione Ebraica ("Center for Jewish Documentation"), in Milan, which collected many documents and photographs of that period.

Sergio Piperno felt a very strong tie with Israel. He took part in the procession of Roman Jews under the Arch of Titus in Rome soon after the U.N. resolution of November 29, 1947 - up to that point, Roman Jews had always refused to pass under the arch, because it was erected to celebrate the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and the enslavement of the Jews. He visited for the first time Israel as President of the Italian Jewish Communities in 1958, and hosted in Rome Golda Meir and Abba Eban when they came as representatives of the State of Israel.

In the international scene, Sergio Piperno Beer was active, in collaboration with the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Rabbi Elio Toaff, in helping evacuate the nearly 4,000 Libyan Jews, who immediately after the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War (June 1967) found themselves in real danger. Thanks to their negotiations with the Italian government, the Jews were allowed by Libyan authorities to escape to Italy, where they added a new vitality to the local Community eventually becaming fully integrated. During the 1970s Piperno also strongly backed the international campaign on behalf of the Soviet Jews' right to emigrate. 

Piperno married Livia Modigliani In March 1943 and they had four children: Giuliana, b. 1944; Maurizio, b. 1945; Gino, b. 1949; Bruno, b. 1951.                                                                                              

Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909-2012), neurologist , 1986 Nobel prize laureate for medecine, born in Torino, Italy. She studied at the University of Torino and after graduation continued to work there. In 1939, following the Fascist racial legislation, she was forced to leave. She continued her research in an improvised laboratory at home the results of which were published in Belgium. In 1947 she moved to Washington University in St. Louis, USA, where she worked with Prof. Victor Hamburger. In 1977 she returned to Italy and was nominated head of the Laboratory for Cell Biology at the National Council for Scientific Research in Rome. In 1986 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for her dicovery of the NGF.

Emilio Segre (1905-1989), physicist, one of the discoverers of the antiproton, born in Tivoli, Italy. He began his engineering studies in Rome and later moved over to physics, which he studied under Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi. He was awarded a doctorate in 1928. He taught at Rome University and was appointed Head of the Physics Department at the University of Palermo in 1936.

In 1938, in the wake of the anti-Semitic regulations in the civil service enacted by the fascist government, Segre immigrated to the United States, where he joined the University of California at Berkeley.

Segre was naturalized an American citizen and participated in the American effort to build the atomic bomb. After his retirement in 1978, he returned to Rome University.

In 1959, Emilio Segre was awarded the Nobel prize for physics, together with Owen Chamberlain, "for their discovery of the antiproton." The proton is a positively charged particle that is found in varying numbers in atomic nuclei. The antiproton is a similar particle, but is negatively charged. The disparity between their charges turns every encounter into a dramatic event in which they nullify one another.

Ladislaus (Laszlo) Farkas (1904-1948), chemist, born in Dunajska Streda, Slovakia (then in the Austria Hungary Empire), the son of a pharmacist. From 1928, he worked as assistant to the Nobel prizewinning chemist, Fritz Haber, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry in Berlin-Dahlem. When the Nazis came to power he moved to Cambridge, England, and in 1934 joined the staff of the Sieff Institute in Rehovot and the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, where he became professor of physical chemistry. Farkas laid the foundations for the Research Council of Israel. He excelled in various fields including photochemistry, gas reactions and combustion. He was killed in an air crash while en route to the US to buy scientific equipment.