The Brunch is free and open to all Har Shalom Congregants and their guests.
No RSVP required. Your attendance at 9:00am minyan before the brunch is encouraged.

For over 22 years of writing and conducting research for her book, "Days of Memory," Judith Monachina often looked up her interviewees’ names online. Even today, with the book finally published, she’ll be at home rereading transcripts from decades ago, and wonder, “Is Graziella [Viterbi] still alive?”
"I Google people and that’s often how I found out we lost them,” Monachina said in an interview with The Eagle. “A couple people died recently, and it’s very hard. But it also feels like they’ve told their story.”
Monachina is doing her part to preserve their stories, and the survivors’ legacies, through writing their oral history. She is a Fullbright Scholar who spent 17 years in Milan researching this material, often without funding so that these stories could be saved. 

In a Boston Harold story by Jeff Robbins (July 15,2024), he writes 

“When local journalist Judith Monachina began interviewing Holocaust survivors in her native western Massachusetts 20 years ago, she didn’t imagine that what began as her personal curiosity about their lives would lead to a groundbreaking book on Jewish Italians who had survived Fascist Italy during World War II. Monachina’s book, “Days of Memory: Listening to Jewish Italians Who Lived Through Fascism and the Holocaust,” is a testament to her ability to earn the trust of survivors who were traumatized by enduring what no one should endure. “I didn’t know how much a person could hurt,” Monachina says about those who had loved ones slaughtered, and who had to flee from those who would slaughter them if they could. “In order to do these interviews with me, they’d have to relive it.”
But though she’s disinclined to be the story, Monachina’s book is inevitably also the personal story of a community journalist’s rather gritty and somewhat improbable determination to document the history of a segment of Fascism’s victims whose lives have garnered relatively little attention. Monachina is not herself Jewish. She had few resources and no connections with which to commence her research and conduct the interviews necessary to complete this increasingly personal project. She read books and attended programs in her spare time, asked virtual strangers if they knew people she could talk to, and scraped together the funds with which to make over 15 trips to Italy to ask the questions she had wanted to ask of the people she learned about. Over the two decades she made this her life’s work, she had plenty of reason to doubt that it would come to fruition.
But it has.”

This should be a very interesting Brunch headlined by a remarkable Author & Historian.
The new book will be available for sale and signing. It was just released on June 30,2024