Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Mayor of Rome Accompanying High Schoolers on Trip to Auschwitz

Mayor Ignazio Marino of Rome is in Poland leading city high school students on the annual “Memory Journey” Holocaust education trip to Auschwitz and Krakow.

Some 144 pupils from 24 high schools in Rome were flown to Poland over the weekend on an Italian Air Force jet. In addition to Marino they were joined by a team of educators, the president of the Rome Jewish community and Holocaust survivor Sami Modiano.

This year’s trip comes less than a week after Marino announced that the long-delayed construction of Rome’s first Holocaust Museum would begin by January on the grounds of Villa Torlonia, the Roman residence of World War II fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

The cornerstone is expected to be laid on Jan. 27 — the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and a date marked in Italy and other countries as International Holocaust Memorial Day.

Plans for the multimillion-dollar museum at the Villa Torlonia site had been stalled for years, and in recent months there had been calls from Holocaust survivors and others to scrap the original project and open the museum instead in a former shopping center in suburban Rome.

In a statement on his website, Marino said the city was preparing a tender for potential firms to carry out the construction of the museum. As a stopgap while the new museum is being built, he said, the city has provided a building in Rome’s historic Jewish Ghetto to serve as a temporary exhibition space and Holocaust education center.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.