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| Five questions to... David Meghnagi
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Campus of Rome III University
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Starting January 2006, around 40 graduates will be selected to attend an innovative MA in Didactics of the Holocaust.
EJP interviewed the designer of the course, David Meghnagi, professor of Clinic-Psychology at Rome III and a member of the Board of the Italian Union of Jewish Communities.
Meghnagi, who is also a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association, has published several books. His latest work, Reassembling what is crushed, focuses the elaboration of collective mourning by analysing the experience of four survivors to the Shoah
How did this masters degree come about?
It is an old idea of mine. Then, in 2004, Italy chaired the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, with whom I was working. That’s when my idea began shaping up into a realistic project.
Who is this course aimed at?
As it aims at providing the right tools to face all issues related to the Shoah and its teaching, the course is addressed in the first place to secondary school teachers, but also to journalists, historians and psychologists. It goes without saying that only candidates with a deep knowledge of the history of anti-Semitic persecutions will be accepted.
How did you manage to organise the course?
I can’t hide my satisfaction for the support we are receiving from organisations such as Yad Vashem, the Italian Ministry for Education and University Research, the Conference of Italian Deans and by a number of European universities. Also, intellectuals such as Avraham Yehoshua, Yehuda Bauer, Elie Wiesel, Radu Mihaileanu and Amos Oz will be lecturing at the Master: in a nutshell, we’ll be offering very high educational standards.
What will the subjects be?
We will first of all study the psychological aspects of trauma and of the reconstruction of memory. We shall then analyse the impact of the Shoah on philosophical and religious thought, be it Jewish or not. For instance, the most important Vatican document on the dialogue with the Jews in the last 40 years, Nostra Aetate, is the Church’s reaction to the Shoah. We will also set up a study method for the historiographic comparison between the Shoah and other genocides. Eventually, we shall study how the Shoah affected literature and the arts, in Israel and in the rest of the world.
How do you think the course fits modern times?
Our students will develop the ability to face and counter the modern forms of anti-Semitism - which has lately replaced the Jew-as-an-individual with the Jew-as-a-nation. Also, we will focus on revisionism and negationism, which were born in Europe and which are feeding contemporary Arab nationalism.
The course is structured in some 350 hrs of front class and 150 of internship, for which some agreements were reached with Yad Vashem and some more are being reached with the Center for Jewish Documentation of Milan and the future Museums of the Shoah in Rome and Ferrara.
The official launching of the Master will be hosted by Rome’s administration in Capitol Hill, Washington next January 25, on the eve of Holocaust Day.
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