Remembrance Day, Meloni chooses Pecoraro to lead the fight against anti-Semitism. La Russa: “Italy and fascism must be forgiven for the racial laws

The request had been peremptory. “On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, and in these opening hours of celebrations and initiatives throughout Italy, we address the president Giorgia Meloni the invitation to express an opinion on the appointment of the national coordinator for the fight against anti-Semitism”. An appeal signed by the president of the Union of Jewish Communities, Noemi of Signsaddressed to the premier after the meeting of the Ucei delegation with the president of the Senate, Ignatius LaRussa. “It is – Di Segni underlined – a vacant office with an executive past and a mandate which, due to its fundamental function – also due to the role that Italy plays in the European and international context – cannot be left in a vacuum” .

Words that Meloni made his own by appointing the prefect in the late afternoon Joseph Shepherd as national coordinator for the fight against anti-Semitism. A role, underlines Di Segni, which represents “an essential safeguard, which must be further strengthened, so that the commitment to a responsible Memory with respect to the Holocaust and the crimes of Nazi-fascism produces significant effects in Italian society, especially among young people”. Pecoraro, in thanking the premier “for his trust”, confided: “I’m happy with this appointment, it gives me the opportunity to lend a hand to the government and contribute to the fight against anti-Semitism, we need it”.

La Russa: “Italy and fascism must be forgiven for the racial laws”

“Italy needs to be forgiven and so does the fascist regime, the promulgation of those hateful laws which were the racial laws”. This was stated in the Ansa podcast ‘Polis’ by the president of the Senate Ignazio La Russa who also reiterated his proposal to establish a day, on November 17, in memory of the racial laws. “I was anxious that the Senate as a whole remember Remembrance Day, without opposition and without abstentions and as the community leaders told me, all with interventions of the highest level, all the interventions of all groups were of an excellent level This interests me, more than the institution or otherwise of another day which I have also been proposing since 2008, but I would not like a fact that is widely shared to pass to a ‘useful or not useful’. It is important, but not very important,” explains La Russa. “The phrase that I repeat with the most conviction is that the day of remembrance must be lived in its daily life. May every day be the day of remembrance”, he concludes.

La Russa: “I propose a rule in memory of racial laws”

“It is also necessary to remember November 17 and the dramatic nature of the racial law with a special provision, a special law, and perhaps the Senate could think about it”.
President Ignazio La Russa said this in the Senate Hall during the commemoration of the Day of Remembrance underway in Palazzo Madama.

La Russa then explained that he did not participate in the meeting of some students of the Morgagni high school in Rome with the concentration camp survivor Sami Modiano (in the Constitution Room at Palazzo Giustiniani) “in order not to give even the slightest hint of politicization of a theme that must belong to everyone”. Then he stressed: “This year we wanted to celebrate the day of Memory in an even more solemn form. We all have a duty not to forget and to make known especially to the younger generations, the drama and atrocities that the Jews suffered starting from the infamy of the Italian racial laws”.

La Russa then explained that “it is everyone’s job, starting with the highest institutions, to pass on the memory so that similar tragedies never happen again in the future, but a better way is precisely that of Memorywithout there is never the certainty of not repeating hateful gestures”. Therefore, concluded the president of the Senate, “we must look to the present and to the future with due attention to racism and anti-Semitism which can no longer find citizenship in any part of the world. And, as far as we are concerned, in our homeland.”