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Jesurum's Venice
Original title: Jesurums Venedig
documentary - DE, 2004, color, 90 min.
biography, biopic, Anti-Fascist film, foreign report

Director Eckhart Schmidt
Producer Raphaela Film GmbH

Synopsis
Napoleone Jesurum became a professing Jew through the Fascists – as he nowadays realizes. Even though he was born into a secular Jewish family, he was, according to himself, a “small, perfectly adapted Fascist” who bore the “M” for Mussolini with pride on his chest. Only the Race Laws made the young man realize to which values he could commit himself.
For generations his family has been one of the main pillars of the Jewish community of Venice. In 1870 they founded the emporium “Jesurum” dealing in Burano lace and precious linen. Mario Levi Morenos took over the business in 1930, Napoleone’s family emigrated to Switzerland. They escaped the fate of about two hundred Venetian Jews who were deported to Auschwitz via the transit camp Fossoli.
With its five synagogues the Venetian Ghetto has been an important part of the Jewish world for centuries. The word ghetto derived from the iron foundries of the lagoon city, it is the most Venetian part of Venice. Italian Fascism and the German occupation since 1943 present the then young people and their descendants with the challenge to fill the guideline from the Torah with life: “Forgive, but not forget.” Eckardt Schmidt approaches the past with Napoleone Jesurum, a rabbi, historian and contemporary witness and describes opportunities for the future.