Rome, the scene of a terrible roundup of Jews in October 1943, will finally have its Holocaust museum, to which the far-right government of Giorgia Meloni gave the green light Thursday evening.
Italy, through "the institution of a national museum of the Shoah in Rome", wants "to contribute to keeping alive and present the memory of the Shoah", explained the government in a press release published at the end of a council of ministers, a week after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to Rome.
The enterprise of extermination of the Jews of Europe carried out by Hitler's Germany during the Second World War, which claimed at least six million victims, also affected Rome, where there was one of the oldest Jewish communities in Europe.
On October 16, 1943, German troops supported by officials of the fascist regime raided the ancient ghetto of Rome, one of the worst and most notorious anti-Semitic operations on the peninsula. 1,023 Jews were deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp and only 16 of them survived.
The Minister of Culture Gennaro Sangiuliano announced at the end of the Council of Ministers the release of ten million euros "to begin to create in our capital" a museum of the Shoah, already "present in all the major capitals of Europe" but which took a quarter of a century to materialize in Italy.
This announcement was welcomed by the Jewish community of Rome, its president Ruth Dureghello however calling in a press release for "choices that can be made in a short time to guarantee the capital of Italy a museum like all the major European capitals".
Very symbolically, the museum will be built on land adjoining the park of Villa Torlonia, which was the residence of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, in power from 1922 to 1943.
It was under his regime that the "racial laws" were adopted, anti-Semitic legislation establishing a whole series of forms of discrimination against Jews: prohibition of access to public service jobs, exclusion of Jewish children from public schools, ban on marrying Italians...
The Shoah museum should "be an instrument of education for democracy, for pluralism (...) because unfortunately we see that things that we considered for granted and as definitive conquests are not", explained Friday to AFP the architect in charge of the project, Luca Zevi.
Asked about the deadlines for carrying out this project, he replied that the museum should see the light of day "in three years" at the most.
03/17/2023 15:24:32 - Rome (AFP) - © 2023 AFP
