Giorno della Memoria. Reading of the Names.

Ceremony of the reading of the names of the Jews deported from Italy and Italian territories.

Opening remarks by Consul General Francesco Genuardi.

Rabbi Nissim Elnecavé will recite kaddish before the beginning of the reading.

During the ceremony we will read brief accounts of the lives of men, women and children whom the Nazi and Fascist regimes had labeled as “foreign Jews” or “stateless Jews”. Some of them arrived in Italy in an attempt to leave Europe, remained trapped and were eventually deported to Auschwitz. The stories have been collected by Anna Pizzuti starting with the book Paper Lives.

On January 27, 1945 the Soviet Army entered and liberated the extermination camp of Auschwitz. This date was chosen to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and to promote the fight against racism and any kind of persecution. Following the efforts of the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research, an intergovernmental organization founded in Sweden in 1998, January 27 was established in Germany and France to remember the victims of Fascism and Nazism. In the year 2000 the Italian Parliament voted the resolution to observe January 27 as “Giorno della Memoria”. Progressively all countries of the European Union followed through. In 2006 the United Nations adopted the commemoration of January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.