Tullia Zevi
Tullia Zevi Calabi ( born February 2, 1919 in Milan, † January 22, 2011 in Rome) was an Italian journalist. From 1983 to 1998 she held the position of President of the Unione delle comunità ebraiche italiane ( UCEI, the Union of Jewish Communities in Italy ).
Life
Tullia Zevi came from a middle-class Jewish family of Sephardic origin. Her father, Giuseppe Calabi, was a prominent lawyer, declared anti-fascist and Freemasons. He was a personal friend of Arturo Toscanini. Tullia Zevi had three siblings.
She studied philosophy at the University of Milan and attended the Conservatory. In 1938, in Italy the fascist, anti-Jewish legislation was introduced, Zevi was with her family during the summer holidays in Switzerland.
As a result of the new political situation, they moved first to Geneva and later to Paris, where Zevi continued her studies at the Sorbonne. In the summer of 1939 the family emigrated aboard the Ile de France from Le Havre to the United States. Zevi continued her studies at the Juilliard School and the Radcliffe College continued and played simultaneously, as before in Paris, in various orchestras harp to earn their livelihood. In that time she met Leonard Bernstein and Frank Sinatra know.
In New York, she lived in antifascist circles and began her career as a journalist, for example, in Quaderni di giustizia e libertà and the Italy against Fascism. In the National Broadcasting Company program she made radio broadcasts that were destined for Italian partisans. They also took on political awareness training as part of the Mazzini Society. In the U.S., she met Bruno Zevi. They married on December 26, 1940 in New York. After the war, in July 1946, she returned, accompanied by Amelia Pincherle with one of the first ships that were also released for civilians back to Italy. Her husband was already there. Together with Aldo Garosci and Alberto Tarchiani 1943 he went back to Italy to join the partisans.
Your return, she founded with the feeling of being guilty of this as survivors and to establish the need for a democratic Italy. In Italy arrived, they began to worry about the reconstruction of the Jewish communities. She was a member of the Partito d' Azione. After its dissolution in 1946 she was interested in the Partito Repubblicano and wrote for La voce Repubblicana. She also worked for other Italian newspapers and was sent as a correspondent at the Nuremberg trials.
More than thirty years - 1960 to 1993 - she worked as a correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Maariw. In this position, she also reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. She also worked for the London weekly The Jewish Chronicle.
From 1978, she was Vice President of UCEI, the Union of Jewish Communities in Italy. Five years later, she became President of the Union, an office which thus for the first time held a woman and that she held until 1998. In this role, she also signed the 1987 Treaty, which established the relationship between the Italian State and the UCEI.
In 1992, she gave the then Italian President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, the Grand Cross of Merit of the Italian Republic.
In 1998 she was elected a member of the Commission for interculturalism the Ministry of Education and a member of the Italian Commission of UNESCO. In the same year she was also a member of the National Bioethics Commission ( Commissione Nazionale per la bioetica ), of which she was until 2006.
In 2007, she published under the title " Ti la mia storia racconto. Dialogo tra nonna e nipote sull'ebraismo " ( I'll tell you my story. Dialogue between grandmother and grandson on Judaism ) her biography, which she had co-authored with her granddaughter Nathania Zevi.
She was buried in the Jewish part of the Campo di Verano January 24, 2011 next to her husband.