In separate classes. The establishment of the jewish school in the papers of the archives of the jewish community of Modena

Abstract

In 1938 Modena hosted one of the main Jewish communities in Emilia Romagna, and Jewishs were unexpect- edly hit by racial laws after years of integration and rich cultural exchange with the city. There were also many children and young people who, at the end of the 1930s, attended the city’s schools and who were suddenly removed from the classrooms and deprived of the possibility of continuing to study with their classmates in September 1938. In the archive of the local Jewish community are preserved the papers that reconstruct the constitution of the classes, both through the requests of the pupils suddenly expelled and through the applications for employment that came from Jewish teachers from all over Italy. The correspondence with the superintendence and with the local institutions allows us to understand the effort and commitment that the community faced in order to give life to classes that were as similar as possible to those that the regime had just dismembered.