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International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2022

logo sinagogaWith the bill n. 211 of the 2000, the Italian government established the International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2022. Since then and every year, in Italy and abroad, all the actors of the Sistema Paese commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and of the Nazism. The day on which Soviet troops broke down the gates of the Auschwitz extermination camp, January 27, was chosen by the UN with a resolution dated 2005.

For some years now, the Italian Cultural Institute of Sydney has been actively collaborating with the Great Synagogue of Sydney for the staging of events that have become a constant in uniting the Italian and Jewish communities in commemorating.

In previous years we remember the film screening about Giorgio Pressburger (M. Caputo’s L’orologio di Monaco) and the conferences by Marco Sonzogni and Alice Loda with Rabbi Elton (translation of the poems The occasional demon by Primo Levi) and Perlasca, an Italian hero with HE Ambassador Francesca Tardioli, Dr Simon Holloway and Rabbi Elton. In 2022, the collaboration with the Great Synagogue is renewed, with a conference which, initially scheduled to be held in York Street, due to the latest developments of the pandemic, will be held on the digital platform ZOOM.

The digital event will have as its main theme the Psychology of the Shoah and will be entitled The Holocaust and the psyche – victim, executioner, bystander, beneficiary. The dissertation will be delivered by Associate Prof. Michael Robertson of the University of Sydney who will provide a review of the different assessments of the psychology of the Holocaust. He will briefly consider both the psychology of the extreme othering – that was a necessary precondition to the Holocaust – as well as the post-war German psyche but will especially focus on the current challenges posed by intergenerational trauma to the children of both survivors and perpetrators. of the Shoah. Rabbi Dr Benjamin Elton will then take the floor and present the point of view of the leader of a Jewish community.

michael robertsonDr. Michael Robertson received his Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery in 1991 from UNSW, a Fellowship from the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists in 1997 and a Doctorate in 2009 from the University of Sydney where he is currently clinical associate professor of Mental health ethics. He is a medical specialist at the NSW Workers Compensation Commission. He specializes in Occupational Psychiatry and Civil Forensic Psychiatry. He has over two decades of profession in acute adult and community psychiatry and has held the position of Head of the Department of Psychiatry at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. Author of several books as well as of numerous specialist publications published in the most reputed world magazines in the sector, he currently also holds the position of Visiting Professorial Fellow at the Sydney Jewish Museum.

Rabbi Dr Benjamin Elton has been Chief Minister of the Great Synagogue since 2015.benjamin elton Born in Manchester, England, Rabbi Elton holds a Masters in History from Queens’ College Cambridge and a PhD in Jewish History from Birkbeck, University of London. . He studied for four years at the Yeshivat Chovevei Torah (YCT) in New York. He published Britain’s Chief Rabbis and the Religious Character of Anglo-Jewry, 1880-1970 and is the author of numerous articles on Anglo-Jewish and Australian religious history. He is also an honorary member at the University of Sydney, a Jewish chaplain of the Returned Services League (NSW branch) and an Orthodox rabbinical advisor to leading institutions.

watch the webinar HERE