MEMORY – UCEI’s commitment to keep it alive

Shortly after the announcement of the ceasefire in Gaza and the release of the first hostages held by Hamas, the President of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI), Noemi Di Segni, appealed for at least one more “ceasefire”: that of distortion and anti-Semitic hatred, calling on public opinion “to refrain from using words such as genocide and war crimes for very different situations: words that the imperative of remembrance dictates that we must not abuse”.
President Di Segni’s appeal comes just days before a new date for Holocaust Remembrance Day and the risk of new instrumentalizations and distortions, also related to the situation in the Middle East. UCEI is also involved this year in numerous initiatives to transmit a living memory to the new generations: a new edition of the Journey of Remembrance, organized by the Ministry of Education and Merit with the collaboration of UCEI itself, which took more than 100 teachers and students from Italian schools to Krakow and Auschwitz-Birkenau, is coming to an end. UCEI’s commitment to the institutions is also confirmed by the traditional Concert for Remembrance, scheduled for the evening of Thursday, January 23, in Rome, in collaboration with the Prime Minister’s Office. Conducted by Davide Casali, the concert will feature the works of several musicians who were persecuted by the Nazis because of their Jewish identity or because they were considered “degenerates”.
In Milan, at the Shoah Memorial, an exhibition will be inaugurated on January 23 on the initiative of the State University and the CDEC Foundation, on how the anti-Semitic laws enacted by Fascism in 1938 were applied in local academia. On the same day, in Rome, at the headquarters of the Shoah Museum Foundation, the exhibition “The End of the Nazi Lagers”, curated by Marcello Pezzetti, will be inaugurated, with the aim of explaining the situation the Allied troops found when they entered the extermination and concentration camps between 1944 and 1945