NEWS Tunisia Will Plant Its Garden of The Righteous

By Daniel Reichel

For the first time, an Arab country will have its Garden of the Righteous. And that country is Tunisia, announced the Italian minister of Foreign Affairs, Paolo Gentiloni. The Garden will be dedicated to all those who fought or are still fighting for freedom and democracy and it is inspired by the one created in Milan, on the Monte Stella.

“We thought of Tunisia because it is a most symbolic and crucial country, placed at the heart of the Mediterranean,” wrote Gentiloni in a message that was read during the European Day for the Righteous in Milan on March 6 (in the picture, the mayor of the city Giuliano Pisapia during the ceremony).

On the same day, Raimondo De Cardona, Italian ambassador in Tunis, where the Garden will be created, announced the initiative and met Abdessatar Ben Moussa, president of the Tunisian League for Human Rights (Nobel Peace Prize 2015), who will work with the Italian embassy to identify persons deserving to be honored in the Garden: each of them will be remembered with a tree planted in their name.

The Garden in Milan, inspired by the one in Yad Vashem, was created as a suggestion of Gabriele Nissim, Chairman of the Gardens of the Righteous Worldwide Committee. It aims at dedicating a symbolic place of a town to the memory of the exemplary figures who morally resisted totalitarianism and genocide all over the world.