1,500 Run in Rome Road Race Highlighting Holocaust History
Image by Getty Images
ROME (JTA) – Hundreds of people ran through the streets of downtown Rome over the weekend to commemorate the Holocaust and look to the future.
Dubbed “Run for Mem”, Sunday’s road race was part of a wide range of events on and around International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which takes place on January 27, the anniversary of the 1945 liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp.
Organizers said around 1,500 participants took part.
Ranging in age from young people to grandparents, the runners wore white T-shirts emblazoned with the race’s slogan, “Race for Remembrance, Looking Ahead.”
The race followed two itineraries starting and ending near the city’s main synagogue in Rome’s old Jewish ghetto and taking runners past sites related to the World War II persecution or deportation of Jews. On hand was Shaul Ladany, an Israeli athlete who survived the Holocaust and also survived the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972.
“Today we are here for something important,” he told the media. “To defend memory, and to make it a value that is ever more alive.”
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
