WJW Staff

When we look at the Holocaust, says Claire Simmons, we focus too much on the perpetrators to the detriment of the victims, too much on numbers and not enough on individuals.

To remedy those perceived drawbacks, she has put together her Mosaic Traditions of Italy tour.

Simmons, 60, who also runs adult Holocaust study tours to Poland and the Czech Republic (where she was born) and similar trips for Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School graduating seniors, says she selected Italy as a destination because she "was enchanted by the story of the rescue of Jews in Italy [from the Nazis]. It is an untold or unappreciated story of how the local population helped rescue 85 percent of the Jewish population."

On the tour, American Jews are able to meet with local Jews and "hear about what it was like to live under Mussolini, how they had integrated into Italian society and how they were rescued," she says. Today, there are about 40,000 Jews in Italy.

The Rockville resident also says Italy enables her to show the tourists how integrated Jews were into Italian life and how much they have contributed to Italian culture, from the Renaissance to modern times, in the fields of medicine, philosophy, history and the arts.

The program begins with a month-and-a-half-long, once-a-week course she teaches at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington in Rockville on the country to be visited. The orientation program ‹ and the tour, as well ‹ is not academic, she says, but tries to instill "an emotional connection to the past."

Simmons ‹ whose accomplishments include founding the Hebrew language department at American University; helping launch the upper school at CES-JDS, where she was chair of the Jewish history department for 14 years; and teaching adults at the JCCGW and in the Florence Melton program ‹ says she wants people on her tours to look at past Jewish civilizations in order to better understand Jewish values, to "rediscover a part of themselves."

Eric Kestler, 58, of Potomac, who went on the first tour of Italy in April, was impressed to learn that Italian Jews lived well until September 1943 when the Nazis invaded northern Italy. He said that one of the trip's highlights was an interview with a man who had been deported to Auschwitz and survived.

A member of the Conservative Kol Shalom in Bethesda, Kestler says he went to discover new roots. "None of my immediate ancestors came from that area, but a distant ancestor was expelled from Spain," he notes, which is why he wanted to learn about that part of the Jewish world.

The tour and the classes took him from the Roman period to the modern day, and it was an "eye-opening" experience, he says.

Howard Marks, 62, of the District, also went on the April tour "because of the reputation of Claire [Simmons] as being an expert on Jewish Holocaust history and to find out more about what happened in Italy in World War II." He also hoped to be able to talk to Italian Holocaust survivors. And, he says, "Italy is beautiful."

He was very impressed to learn that Italy had saved such a high percentage of its Jewish population. Marks, a member of Alexandria's Reform Beth El Hebrew Congregation, remembers speaking to a man whose parents had hidden several Jewish families at the peril of their own children.

"He told us he was taken by the scruff of his neck by his father and told not to tell anyone we are hiding Jews," Marks says. The man said that he wanted to talk to them because he wanted to honor his parents.

"We hold in great esteem the Italian people for their decency in saving their fellow [Jewish] countrymen," Marks says. "It is a story that needs to be told."

The Jewish tours of Italy are held in cooperation with the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington. The next one is scheduled for October.

Simmons says she also is planning Sephardic heritage tours of Bulgaria and Turkey.