ROME – Ardeatine Caves massacre commemorated

Italian top state officials and leaders of the Roman Jewish Community commemorated the victims of the WWII Ardeatine Caves massacre on the southern outskirts of Rome on March 24. Italian President Sergio Mattarella laid a wreath and read the names of the 335 victims executed 80 years ago by Nazi officers in a reprisal for a partisan attack that killed 33 German soldiers. The Chief Rabbi of Rome Riccardo Di Segni offered a Jewish prayer, and military chaplain Sergio Siddi led the Catholic rite. According to tradition, only the representative of the National Association of Italian Martyrs’ Families (ANFIM) spoke. “All over the word, tensions are rising, wars are continuing, and horrors are not being appeased. The values on which our civil coexistence is based are constantly being challenged,” warned the association’s president Francesco Albertarelli, noting a steady erosion of the importance of historical memory. “Europe, as conceived in the Ventotene Manifesto (a political statement written during WWII and considered the birth of European federalism) now seems as utopian as the European federation supported by the intellectuals of the Partito d’Azione (a republican, anti-fascist party founded in 1942) many of whom are buried here.” At the same time, he added, “international organizations seem to have lost all interest in confused, lost, and frightened communities. We prefer to blame others, and in the end we ourselves become guilty.” “In reaffirming our rejection of war and the need for peace,” he concluded, the time has come for everyone “to assume their responsibilities.”

The ceremony was attended by the President of the UCEI, Noemi Di Segni, the President of the Jewish Community of Rome, Victor Fadlun, and the Ambassador of Israel to Italy, Jonathan Peled. Wreaths were also laid in front of the Great Synagogue. 

Photo: Quirinal