The Napoleone Jesurum Residency honors the memory of the co-founder and first president of Beit Venezia, Napoleone (Leo) Jesurum (1929-2017), who believed in the Ghetto of Venice as a place of memory and a source of inspiration for the future.
Born in Venice in 1924, he has told the story of a childhood scarred by fascism and the war, and his subsequent full and varied professional career in Storia di una normalità negata (A Normality Denied). For many years he visited schools to speak of his experiences, making a vital contribution to the remembrance of the Shoah in Italy.
In 2014 Beit Venezia celebrated its first five years of activity (2009–2014) with the publication Napoleone Jesurum – La mia testimonianza | My Testimony.
In collaboration with his family, in 2018 and 2019 we invited an artist to live in Venice and write about the Ghetto to honor Leo’s memory.
2019
Marjorie Agosín is the Pura Belpré Award-winning author of I Lived on Butterfly Hill. She was raised in Chile by Jewish parents. Her family moved to the United States to escape the horrors of the Pinochet takeover of their country. Coming from a South American country and being Jewish, Agosín’s writings demonstrate a unique blending of these cultures. She has received the Letras de Oro Prize for her poetry, and her writings about, and humanitarian work for, women in Chile have been the focus of feature articles in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Ms. Magazine. She has also won the Latino Literature Prize for her poetry. She is a Spanish professor at Wellesley College.
2018
Motti Lerner is a playwright and screenwriter, born in Israel in 1949. Most of his plays and films deal with political themes. He is a recipient of the Best Play Award (1985), the Israeli Motion Picture Academy’s award for Best TV Drama (1995), the 2004 winner of The Prime Minister of Israel’s award for his creative work, and, in 2014,of the Landau Prize for the Performing Arts. Lerner has taught playwriting at Tel Aviv University, and Duke University and Knox College in the US. During the residency in Venice, he shared some of his time and writing with Italian Jewish author Laura Forti.
