Italy granted her a pension for Holocaust survivors. Then it asked for the money back.

(JTA) — In 2012, Messauda Fadlun received a letter from the Italian government asking her to return all the money she had been receiving as part of a restitution program for those racially persecuted by the fascist regime during World War II.

Fadlun, an Italian-Libyan Jew, and her family were shocked.

“We thought there had been a mistake,” said Ariel Finzi, Fadlun’s son, who is the rabbi of Naples. “Worst case, we presumed the government would stop paying for the pension, but not that we would have to return the money.”

They were wrong: It was just the beginning of a long legal fight with the Italian government, which claimed she had not been eligible to receive the pension, despite granting it earlier. Fadlun died in 2018, and now her 98-year-old husband, Alberto Finzi, is expected to pay the sum of 76,000 euros (about $92,000). Continue reading here.

A Walk Through Bukharian Queens — Just Don’t Call It ‘Russian’

The most common misconception about Bukharian Jews?

Manashe Khaimov hesitates for a few seconds, then answers: “That we are Russian Jews. The only thing we share with Russian Jews,” he continues, “are the 70 years we lived under the Soviet Union. For 2,000 years, we had a different history, a different culture.”

A community little-known even to other Jews, Bukharian Jewry claims two millennia of history in Central Asia, namely in today’s Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, most of them migrated to Israel and the United States. Khaimov estimates that, today, some 70,000 Bukharians live in Queens, New York.