Italy grants $29m to help complete Jewish museum
Italy’s national Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah, or MEIS, under fitful development in the northeast city of Ferrara for more than a decade, has received a $29 million government grant in order to enable its completion.
Italian Culture and Tourism Minister Dario Franceschini announced the funding May 2 as part of a $1.15 billion package of state grants for 33 cultural heritage sites and projects throughout the country.
MEIS, due to open next year, will not only be a Holocaust museum, Franceschini told the Italian Jewish information website moked.it.
“It will in fact above all be a place to recount Italian Judaism in all its richness and many facets — its history, its traditions, its multimillennium presence in this country,” he said. — jta
Model of gold ring gifted to Schindler is given to museum
A model used by grateful Jewish workers to create a gold ring for Oskar Schindler has been found and donated to the Melbourne Jewish Holocaust Centre, where it will go on display.
The model was in the Melbourne workshop of ring maker Jozef Gross for more than 50 years.
The ring-making portrayed in Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” indicated the gold was from prisoners’ teeth, according to the Holocaust center.
Schindler, the hero of Thomas Kenneally’s book “Schindler’s Ark” as well as the Oscar-winning film, was a German industrialist and member of the Nazi party who saved Jews by employing them in his factory and treating them humanely. He saved about 1,200 Jews.
At the end of the war, Gross, a master jeweler, made the ring for Schindler, who lost it shortly after. The model came to Australia with Gross and was discovered by his son, Louis, in a box along with other jewelry-making paraphernalia after Gross died in 1997. It is one of the few physical objects remaining from Schindler’s factory. — jta
Montreal police seize 8,000 bottles of kosher wine imported illegally
Police seized some 8,000 bottles of kosher wine in what appeared to be a Passover-related bootlegging bust at a Montreal synagogue.
Two men were arrested at the Young Israel of Montreal synagogue on April 26, where police found 650 cases of kosher wine from Israel, Australia and the United States in its basement.
Quebec prohibits the private sale of alcohol except through mandated provincial agency stores, although some wines and beers sold at grocery stores are exempt.Also allowed is some private importing of alcohol as long as special taxes are paid to the agency, known as a Crown corporation.
According to news reports, increased Passover demand for kosher wines combined with a minimal selection at agency stores and prohibitive prices prompted the creation of illegal “stores.” Such stores are something of an open secret within the Jewish community come holiday time.
“There is not a big kosher selection [at the agency stores],” one synagogue member told Global News.
In 2010, a Hassidic synagogue in Montreal was charged with illegally bringing in about 1,000 bottles of kosher wine without a permit. — jta