Stella Levi

April 24 2023: In an intimate and warm ceremony today in New York, the Ambassador of Italy to the United States, Mariangela Zappia, presented Ms. Stella Levi with the honor of Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, conferred on her by the President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella, last December 30th.

“Stella Levi’s lifelong commitment to the dissemination of her testimony and the preservation of memory makes her an example of resilience, generosity, and extraordinary intellectual depth,” highlighted Ambassador Zappia uponpresenting Stella Levi with the honor.

The ceremony took place a few days after the Italian Head of State’s visit to the Auschwitz extermination camp and his participation in the “March of the Living,” on April 18th during his state visit to Poland, falling therefore within the commitment of Italy to preserve the memory of the Holocaust and to promote awareness of it. Stella Levi was born on May 5, 1923, on the island of Rhodes where, because of the racial laws of 1938, she was expelled from the Italian school where she was studying. On July 23, 1944, after the armistice and the subsequent German capture of Rhodes, she was deported to Auschwitz. Of all her family — parents, aunts, cousins, and their children — she and her sister Renée were the only survivors. Upon liberation in 1945, Stella and her sister were repatriated to Italy by the Allied army. In 1947, theydecided to move to the United States where their older sisters, who had emigrated before the war, lived.

In the United States, Ms. Levi found a job working for an import-export agency, settling in New York. Over the years, Stella Levi expanded her activities and started to travel, in Italy as well. In the 1970s, she decided to return to Rhodes for the first time and began to devote herself to the recovery of Jewish memory and culture, and supported, together with other Jews from Rhodes, the restoration of the synagogue, the creation of the museum, and the gradual rebirth of the community.

At the end of the ‘90s, she took part in the birth of the Primo Levi Center in New York, becoming a source of inspiration for it, in particular for research projects on colonial fascism and the political use of remembrance. Alongside Primo Levi, Stella criticized the rhetoric of survival as necessity or success, trying to draw attention to the importance of ethical choices and solidarity. At one of the Center’s events at New York University’s Casa Italiana, she met the writer, Michael Frank. After seven years of weekly conversation between the two, the volume One Hundred Saturdays, Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World emerged, also published in Italy by Einaudi.

Article from: Ambasciata d’Italia a Washington