Call For Census Of Gypsies In Italy Recalls Pre-Holocaust Anti-Semitic Laws

Matteo Salvini Image by Getty Images

By JTA June 19, 2018

ROME (JTA)— Italy’s Jewish community condemned a call by the country’s hardline interior minister to take a census of Italy’s Roma, or Gypsy, population.

The Union of Italian Jewish Communities, or UCEI, said in a statement issued Tuesday that the call by Matteo Salvini to create a “registry” of Roma in Italy recalled the anti-Semitic legislation introduced by Italy’s fascist government on the eve of the Holocaust in 1938.

Salvini told a TV station on Monday that he had asked the ministry to prepare a dossier on the situation of Roma in Italy “in order to see ‘who,’ ‘how,’ and ‘how many.’” His statement drew sharp protest from the center-left opposition. Later, he said he had no intention of “creating files or taking digital fingerprints” of individual Roma.

Salvini’s “announcement of a possible, specific census of the Roma population in Italy worries us and reawakens memories of the racist measures taken just 80 years ago and, sadly, increasingly forgotten,” the UCEI statement said.

Salvini is the leader of the right-wing League Party, which in the March 4 elections scored victories in much of northern Italy with a virulent anti-immigrant platform.

The UCEI statement said there was no “search for consensus, no anxiety about public order that justifies the disturbing proposal to single out specific social categories of citizens, to censor them and subject them to special security policies reserved only for them.”

Alyssa Fisher is a news writer at the Forward. Email her at [email protected], or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

The coming year promises to be filled with more complex and historic developments. We are entering an era where independent, fact-based Jewish journalism will be more important than ever. We need to be ready for whatever 2025 will bring, and with your help, we can be.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO