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July 28, 2000/25 Tammuz 5760, Vol. 52, No.46
Italian woman reaches 100, has 'faith in life'
RUTH E. GRUBER
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
ANCONA, Italy - "If I have a message for young people today, it would be this," says Dr. Lucia Servadio Bedarida. "Have faith in life - life is stronger than death. Indeed, the Jewish religion emphasizes life."
Servadio knows what she is talking about.
Earlier this month, the petite, white-haired great-grandmother turned 100.
Though Servadio now lives in New York state, she chose to celebrate her centenary July 17 in the Italian port of Ancona, the city on the Adriatic where she was born.
"I've always lived life to the full, despite all the difficulties," Servadio said on the eve of her birthday.
She was born July 17, 1900, into a middle-class Ancona family. Ancona is one of Italy's oldest Jewish cities.
Servadio's father was a businessman and, like most Italian Jews, her parents and grandparents had strong Italian and Jewish identities.
"My family was immersed in Italian culture," Servadio said. "We grew up here in Ancona with no problems."
The family moved to Rome after World War I, partly so that Servadio could continue her studies.
Not only did she get an undergraduate degree in 1922, but she went on to become a medical doctor -a rare achievement at the time for a woman.
Servadio married another doctor, who became the director of a hospital in the small town of Vasto in Italy's Abruzzi region. It is here that the family found itself when Italy's fascist regime imposed harsh anti-Semitic laws in 1938.
In 1939, the family left Italy, carrying only a few possessions. They ended up in Tan-gier, Morocco, where Servadio would live -and work as a doctor -until 1981.
During the war, family members back in Italy braved persecution and fought in the Italian Resistance.
But her mother, then 64, and her 89-year-old grandmother, were deported to their deaths.
"They were taken to Fossoli camp in Italy, and then to Auschwitz," she said.
Servadio said she had no problems living as a Jew in Morocco, even at the time of the 1967 Six-Day War. When the war broke out, she was visiting her brother in Brazil, but returned to Tangier with no problem.
There, she worked under cover to help Jews who wanted to make aliyah to Israel.
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