A day in the ghetto of Rome. Survivors, hidden kippahs and Digos. Mentana: "The left has left Israel to the right"

They hide their kippahs under their baseball caps, their mothers don't talk to you, the Digos, here, is also on the plate. We search, and we find, in the ghetto of Rome, in via Santa Maria del Pianto, via Reginella, piazza Mattei, on the eve of the great demonstration against Netanyahu, in Piazza San Giovanni, the sweetened fear, that which Emanuele Di Porto, 94 years old, a survivor of the Shoah, defines as "prudence", Enrico Mentana, "the serene life of a small town", Professor Linda Laura Sabbadini "a smell", the fried fear: "Do you smell it?". What? "It's fear". Anti-Semitism, here, melts in the air like Marx's solid, it becomes gaseous.

I randomly stop the first officer to ask if it is true that life has disappeared from the ghetto of Rome, if it is true that, as the waitress Rabea complains: “No one comes here, everyone is in anguish here. Disaster”. What is true? The officer says that since “Sette ottobre” the attendance has dropped, but it would be false to describe this straight line, two hundred meters of tables, menus, lamb, artichokes, and cheeses, like an open-air tunnel: “Sooner or later life returns, always, the tourists come back to shuffle around and, if you ask, you will find out that they have opened four more restaurants”.

On the walls of the Jewish school Vittorio Polacco, since “Sette ottobre” there are pictures of the Israeli hostages and there is security at every corner, which however is discreet, smiling, beards and bellies like in the novel “The Charlatan” by Singer. Nobody talks about Elly Schlein, about her choice to exclude Renzi and Calenda from the big demonstration, to insert a clear reference to anti-Semitism, nobody cares about the intervention of the Palestinian journalist Rula Jebrael because she tells Umberto Di Veroli, a social health worker, Jewish, a son who is studying to become a rabbi: “Look, in the ghetto there will be no more than twenty Jews left in total”. It offers a map that looks like a Rai schedule: "There, on the right, on the top floor, lives Mara Venier who has two apartments, a penthouse and a super penthouse, but there is also Lucia Annunziata's house; a little further on you can find the director Mentana, but the real star is Di Porto, "the child of the tram", who at 94 years old has moved to Viale Marconi, but who every morning, on this bench, tells his story".

There is a beautiful conspiracy of secrecy all around, an electoral silence that they explain at the Ghetto Bakery, in Piazza Costaguti, is due to the elections of the Jewish community. Voting is taking place this Sunday and there are about ten thousand voters, three lists presented, a probable winner, the incumbent, Victor Fadlun who is challenged by Noemi Di Segni and Barbara Pontecorvo. They say in front of the synagogue (15 euros, guided tour) a few meters from the Jewish community bookshop, that Di Segni's list would be the "leftist" list and that Fadlun, the incumbent, a centrist, would have resigned to strengthen his majority.

It is basically a reshuffle like this neighborhood was reshuffled, where now even ham is sold, where the kippah is kept in the pocket at the suggestion of the chief rabbi. The dominant nationality is American and then there are the French who come to buy Mario Dondero's photographs at the small Louvre Museum. There is no Jew who can call "Netanyahu the executioner", but Avi, one of the brothers who own BaGhetto, four restaurants, kosher cuisine, says that "the war must end now. The hostages must be freed and then that's it". He says this as he approaches the table where Mentana is waiting for us with his little girls, Nina and Bice, the Cavalier Kings, Mentana who, on this table, breaks his head every day, Mentana who thinks (and how beautiful it would be if he thought today in Milan, at the Teatro Parenti): “The left cannot be with Netanyahu, but there was a time when the left was with Israel. The kibbutz was a socialist experiment, the Russian Foreign Minister Gromyko boasted that his hand, his vote, at the UN, had given birth to the state of Israel. The left has left Israel to the right, but what was more romantic for a young leftist, after 1945, than the Israeli battle to survive? The battle of David against Goliath?”.

Mentana says that "the Holocaust was Europe's great fault until the twentieth century" and that "we have carried the weight of history but the survivors are dying and Europe is forgetting that fault". I then return to that wooden bench, the bench where every day Emanuele Di Porto, a Jew, tells his story to anyone who wants to listen: “On the night of October 16, 1943, the Germans came to the ghetto to carry out roundups. In the previous days they had asked for 50 kilos of gold or they threatened to capture 200 fathers. The whole community, also thanks to the help of the Catholics, collected the gold. It wasn’t enough. The fascists sold us with the price list: 5,000 lire for men, 3,000 lire for women. The Germans came. Not finding my father, they captured my mother. I was thirteen. I cried, I grabbed my mother by the skirt, she screamed at me: run away, go away. They captured us. At a certain point, my mother threw me off the truck. I didn’t give up. I went looking for her. I got on a tram, convinced I would find her, but an Italian ticket collector, who had understood everything, ordered me to stay close to him. For three days the ticket collectors, in turns, kept me on that tram. They saved me, risking their lives. To survive I then went to sell souvenirs, in place of my father who was crying. He didn't eat. One day a German soldier, instead of paying me fifty lire, gave me 500. A mistake. I was terrified, and I didn't leave the house anymore. When I went back to sell, who did I find? The same soldier who also gave me a chocolate. At 94 years old I understood that that money wasn't a mistake, but a help. It's the proof that you could be human even among beasts. Today you ask me what I think of Netanyahu, and you're right, but the question embarrasses me. I can answer that I'm a Jew, a survivor, by chance. When I die people will be able to say: it was just a story. Now do you understand why every day I look for someone to tell it to?”.

More on these topics: