The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation commemorates the 2022 edition of Holocaust Remembrance Day with a wide-ranging programme of initiatives involving the network of Embassies, Consulates and Italian Cultural Institutes.
Holocaust Remembrance Day is an international commemoration day celebrated on January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, to remember all the victims of the Holocaust, so that what happened will never happen again.
On this occasion, the Farnesina is promoting the streaming on the italiana portal of the short film ‘Non ho sentito gridare nessuno’ (There were no screams) by the director Giuseppe Carrieri, made in collaboration with the IULMOvie Lab of the IULM University of Milan. The protagonist of the video is Nazi concentration camp survivor and partisan Riccardo Goruppi, who witnessed the atrocities in Dachau. In the short film, Goruppi, who passed away last April at the age of 94, talks to the pupils of the ’Simon Gregorčič’ state lower secondary school in Dolina (Trieste), in a symbolic handover of the baton of testimony to the new generations. ‘Non ho sentito gridare nessuno’ will be the pilot episode of Diritti Lab, a series dedicated to human rights and fundamental freedoms consisting of thirteen films made by young IULM graduates and undergraduates. The shorts, each dedicated to a specific right, will be published on a monthly basis from February 2022 to January 2023. This cultural diplomacy initiative, which aims to inspire the international audience to reflect on the theme of human rights and fundamental freedoms, is part of Italy’s bilateral and multilateral efforts to defend them and is the cornerstone of Italian foreign policy.
In addition, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation has produced a video presentation of the exhibition ‘1849-1871. Ebrei di Roma tra segregazione ed emancipazione‘ (Jews of Rome: segregation and emancipation), open to the public from 10 November 2021 to 27 May 2022 at the Jewish Museum of Rome. The exhibition recounts the role of Rome’s Jewish community in the Risorgimento and the construction of a united Italy. The video was made by Dario Prosperini, with contributions from the curators Giorgia Calò and Francesco Leone and the director of the Jewish Museum of Rome, Olga Melasecchi.
There are numerous network initiatives. In particular, the Italian Embassy in Israel and the Italian Cultural Institute of Tel Aviv are taking part in the Ceremony of the Lighting of the Eternal Flame at Yad Vashem, the National Holocaust Remembrance Centre.
Finally, other initiatives include:
- The exhibition in Zagreb ’Primo Levi – fumetto biografico’ (Primo Levi – A biographical comic).
- Three different meetings (in Washington, Madrid and Berlin) with the testimony of Edith Bruck.
- A conference in London to learn more about the role of the Fossoli transit camp
- The streamed broadcast, thanks to the Italian Cultural Institute of San Paolo, of the documentary ‘1938: Diversi’
- A conversation in Oslo between the writer Simon Stranger and the critic Preben Jordal
- A concert by Gabriele Cohen, Pietro Lussu and Barbara Eramo in Los Angeles and San Francisco
- A concert in Istanbul ’Shabbat Shalom. Canti e parole di vita’ (Shabbat Shalom. Songs and words of life) by the duo Delilah Gutman and Refael Negri.
- The premiere of the new opera ‘The Garden of the Finzi-Continis’ in New York.
- An online course on Italian comics and the Holocaust organized by the Italian Cultural Institute of Tel Aviv;
- Alexandre Valenti’s documentary ‘Maestro’ about the musicologist and pianist who devoted more than 20 years to recovering the music composed by Holocaust victims available on the Italian Cultural Institute of Rio de Janeiro vimeo channel.