Seventy-seven year-old Dina Cohen is one of the pioneers of this Israeli community in the Sesia Valley, aka Valsesia, in the Piedmont region of northwest Italy. “When I arrived there were barely 20 people here,” she says. But Cohen is also a pioneer in other ways. Having been born four days after Israel came into being in May 1948 (“When Ben-Gurion was declaring the state, my mother was already in the hospital, waiting to give birth”), and after growing up on a kibbutz and raising a family in Jerusalem – Cohen’s life is suffused with much of the formative ethos of Zionism.
