Edda servi machlin biography

Edda Debora Rafaella Servi was born on Feb. 22, 1926, in Pitigliano.
Edda was born in 1926 in the small town of Pitigliano in Tuscany, which had long been home to a thriving Jewish community.
In her 50s, Mrs. Machlin resumed her education, enrolling at Columbia University, where she received a bachelor's degree in Spanish literature.

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Ordinary to Extraordinary Lives: Edda Debora Rafaelle Servi Machlin

Photo credit: Sara Krulwich, New York Times

Edda Debora Rafaella Servi was born in Pitigliano, Italy on February 22, 1926. This small town in Tuscany was known as the little Jerusalem due to the large Jewish community which had been in the region for centuries. Servi’s father was the village Rabbi. It was with her mother Sara that she learned many of the traditional Italian-Jewish recipes that would become part of a series of cookbooks she published later in her life.

What had been a peaceful life for Servi’s family changed dramatically in 1936 when Benito Mussolini entered a pact with Germany. Anti-Semitic laws passed in 1938 further altered the dynamic between Jews and gentiles. In 1943, Servi’s parents and youngest brother were sent to a concentration camp in northern Italy. Servi, two sisters and a brother fled into the Tuscany hills where farmers risked their own well-being to shelter them.

Servi’s parents and brother were liberated from the concentration camp and they were all able to reunite back in P

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Italy: the death of Edda Servi Machlin prompts focus on Jewish Pitigliano

The death last month of Edda Servi Machlin, known for her Italian Jewish cookbooks, has prompted a focus on the Jewish heritage in her hometown, the beautiful hill town of Pitigliano, dramatically perched on a neck of rust-colored tufa rock in southern Tuscany.

In her landmark (and now, sadly, out of print) 1981 book The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews, Servi Machlin — who died August 16 aged 93, at her home in New York — combined traditional recipes and menus from Pitigliano and elsewhere in Italy with a movingly written memoir about Pitigliano’s Jews and their vanished way of life in what was once (and indeed still is) known as the “little Jerusalem” – la Piccola Gerusalemme.

Jewish history in the town dates back to the 16th century. The community grew as Jews sought refuge there from the Papal States, following the anti-Jewish 1555 Papal Bull Cum nimis absurdum that forced the Jews of Rome into a ghetto and imposed other wide-ranging restrictions on J

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ITALICS Edda Servi Machlin and Remembering Jewish Italy

Pubblicato in Italian Word of the Week il

By Yvette Alt Miller*

Edda Servi Machlin has died at the age of 93. The cookbook writer changed many people’s understanding of Jewish cuisine and culture by writing prolifically about her childhood growing up in Italy’s distinctive Jewish community. Dating to Biblical times, the Jews of Italy have their own unique traditions, distinct from both Ashkenazi and Sephardi culture. Edda’s warm reminiscences – and delectable recipes – brought this world to life.

Edda was born in 1926 in the small town of Pitigliano in Tuscany, which had long been home to a thriving Jewish community. About 20 Jewish families lived in Pitigliano in the 1930s; though small, their community was proud and vibrant, boasting a beautiful synagogue, a Jewish library, two yeshivas, and a Jewish cemetery.

One unusual element of Jewish infrastructure in the town made the biggest impression on Edda: the town’s communal kosher oven, which was said to have first been built by Jews fleeing the Spanish In