NEWS Jewish Community of Naples announces it will not participate in Remembrance event by Municipality
By Pagine Ebraiche staff
The Jewish Community of Naples announced that it will not be present at the laying of nine stumbling blocks in memory of the members of the Procaccia-Pacifici-Molco families barbarously slaughtered in the Shoah. The decision has been taken due to the fact that the new municipal board member for culture Eleonora de Majo, known for her hateful positions towards Israel, will participate in the initiative.
“We want to reiterate that there are things that pass and others that remain, especially in the intangible memory of the city. Well, initiatives such as that of installing the nine stolpersteine fall into this latter case. Therefore, by their very nature they cannot lend themselves to misunderstandings of any kind, especially if there are values with high and unequivocal meanings at stake, such as the right to exist for the State of Israel,” read the letter the community sent to the municipality.
De Majo’s attitude has already been denounced in November by the Jewish community in a note in which it was recalled that the board member in the recent past had said that “Zionism is Nazism”, compared Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to Hitler, called the Israeli government “a handful of murderers” and the Israelis “swine, hated blind, denialists and traitors even of your own tragedy”.
De Majo also questioned the number of Jews murdered in the Shoah.
The Community will therefore be absent on Tuesday morning on the occasion of the official laying of the stones, requested by journalists Nico Pirozzi and Alfredo Cafasso Vitale.
The nine victims will be remembered in a special ceremony, scheduled for January 30th. The event will offer an opportunity, “to the many Neapolitans who refuse easy rhetoric,” and are “convinced that respecting living Jews and their institutions is the best way to remember those destroyed in the vortex of the Shoah.”
The decision of the Neapolitan community obtained the support among others from the Italy-Israel Federation.