Rome, scene of a roundup of Jews in 1943, will have its own Holocaust museum

Rome, the scene of a horrific roundup of Jews in October 1943, will finally have its own Holocaust museum, given the green light by Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government on Thursday evening.

Italy, through the “institution of a National Museum of the Shoah in Rome”, “wants to contribute to keeping alive and presenting the memory of the Shoah”, explained the government in a press release published at the end of the Council of Ministers, Israel’s prime minister. A week after Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Rome.

The extermination enterprise of Europe’s Jews undertaken by Hitler’s Germany during World War II, which claimed at least six million victims, also affected Rome, where it had one of the oldest Jewish communities in Europe.

On October 16, 1943, German troops, supported by officers of the fascist regime, raided the ancient Ghetto of Rome, one of the worst and most infamous anti-Jewish campaigns on the peninsula. Of the 1,023 Jews deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp, only 16 survived.

Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano announced at the end of the Council of Ministers the release of ten million euros “to begin to build in our capital” a museum of the Shoah, which already “exists in all the major capitals of Europe” but which To materialize in Italy took a quarter of a century.

The announcement was welcomed by the Jewish community of Rome, with its president, Ruth Dureghello, writing a press release for “choices that can be made in the short term to guarantee the capital of Italy a museum like all major European capitals”. Issued.

Very symbolically, the museum will be built on land adjacent to the park of the Villa Torlonia, which was the residence of Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator who was in power from 1922 to 1943.

It was under his rule that the “Race Laws” were adopted, anti-Jewish laws establishing a whole range of forms of discrimination against Jews: the prohibition of access to public service jobs, the exclusion of Jewish children from public schools, Ban on marrying Italians. ,

The Shoah Museum should be “an instrument of education in democracy, in pluralism (…) because unfortunately we see that the things we regard as acquired and certain victories are not”, the architect in charge of the project Explained to AFP on Friday, Luca Zevi.

When asked about the time frame for completing the project, he replied that the museum should see the light of day “in three years”.