On Oct. 16, 1943, the Gestapo raided the ghetto, rounding up 1,022 Jews who were subsequently deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
“Two hundred were children. Sixteen of them returned, only one woman among them,” Rome’s chief rabbi, Riccardo Di Segni, told the crowd at the event’s concluding ceremony.
Among the speakers on the stage were the president of Italy, Sergio Mattarella; the mayor of Rome, Roberto Gualtieri; Di Segni; Victor Fadlun, president of the Jewish Community of Rome organization; Andrea Riccardi, founder of the Community of Sant’Egidio; representatives of the Italian Parliament; and members of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s cabinet.
Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, president of the Italian Bishops’ Conference; Bishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life; and Ambrogio Spreafico, bishop of Anagni-Alatri, were also present.
This was an opportunity to remember “one of the most shocking and inhuman events that our city experienced in the 20th century,” Gualtieri said in his remarks.
“It is necessary to always recognize and fight the virus of anti-Semitism when it appears in its multiple metamorphoses,” he continued. “This is also why it is important to be here today.”