Gift of Joan E. Gerstler in memory of Simon Kort

Id no. 56.96, Other, Italian, English

March 30 1943 to March 17 1944, Libya, Africa

Subject(s):  Defiance-religious and cultural, Education

This is the notebook of Ida Labi, with her signature on the bottom of the cover page, under the picture of Pinocchio. Ida was a student of Simon Kort. Simon Kort and his students were all interned by the Fascists in the small Italian town of Civitella del Tronto. Kort had arrived in Civitella with a group of other German and Polish Jews, arrested for evading the 1938 orders for all foreign Jews to leave Italy. Ida came with a group of 60 Sephardic Jews from Libya who arrived in Civitella at the end of 1941. Libya was an Italian colony where the Fascists sometimes implemented their anti-Jewish regulations. The group of Libyan Jews included men, women, and children. Seeing the children missing out on their education, Kort resourcefully decided to use his skills to teach them math, English, and other basic subjects. Kort was born in Berlin, Germany in 1910, and moved to Italy in 1935 seeking economic opportunities. He found employment in electrical company in Milan. In August 1940, Kort was arrested and transported to internment in south central Italy a month later. With the arrival of German forces in Civitella after the Italian surrender in 1943, Kort tried to escape into the countryside, but was eventually rounded up and taken into forced labor. In 1944, Kort escaped once again, and survived the war working as an interpreter and guide with the partisans in the mountains above Civitella. Kort’s parents, sister, and many other relatives were murdered during the Holocaust. After the war, in 1947, Kort immigrated to the United States. He lost contact with his students, but many of them returned to Libya after the war, and eventually immigrated to Israel. Kort died in New York in 1994. This notebook was donated by his cousin.

Discover more about this artifact and other stories from the Museum’s collection in, “To Life: 36 Stories of Memory and Hope” http://www.pickmanmuseumshop.com/tolif36storo.html.