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

Italy, through "the institution of a national museum of the Holocaust in Rome", wants to "contribute to keeping alive and presents the memory of the Holocaust", explained the government in a statement published after a council of ministers, a week after the visit to Rome of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Hitler's World War II extermination of European Jewry, which claimed at least six million lives, also affected Rome, home to one of Europe's oldest Jewish communities.

On October 16, 1943, German troops supported by officials of the fascist regime rounded up Rome's ancient ghetto, one of the worst and best-known anti-Semitic operations on the peninsula. 1,023 Jews were deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp and only 16 of them survived.

Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano announced at the end of the Council of Ministers the release of ten million euros "to start building in our capital" a museum of the Holocaust, 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 calling however in a statement for "feasible choices in a short time to guarantee the capital of Italy a museum like all major European capitals".

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

It was under his regime that the "racial laws" were adopted, an anti-Semitic legislation instituting a whole series of discriminations against Jews: prohibition of access to public service jobs, exclusion of Jewish children from public schools, prohibition of marrying Italians...

The Holocaust Museum should "be an instrument of education for democracy, pluralism (...) because unfortunately we see that things that we took for granted and as definitive conquests are not," the architect in charge of the project, Luca Zevi, told AFP on Friday.

Asked about the timelines for the project, he replied that the museum should see the light of day "in three years" at most.

© 2023 AFP