Fury as Italian educators try to equate local massacre with the Holocaust

A circular issued by the Italian Ministry of Education to heads of schools has caused anger in Italy’s Jewish community for comparing a local massacre to the Holocaust.

The guidelines were issued ahead of the National Memorial Day, or Day of the Exiles, on 10th February, which also commemorates events known as Foibe, during which up to 350,000 members of the ethnic Italian population in north-east Italy were killed by Yugoslav Partisans during and after WWII.  

The guidelines, which seek to draw a parallel between the killing of the Italians, whose leader Mussolini was a close ally of Hitler, with the wholesale slaughter of Europe’s Jews, has generated outrage.

The National Association of Italian Partisans (ANPI) – who fought against Mussolini – has stated that the parallel is “aberrant and unacceptable”, while Emanuele Fiano, a member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies and a prominent figure in the Italian Jewish community, said that the comparison between “the project of total extermination of the Jewish people [and the] massacre of Foibe by Tito’s troops is totally wrong.”

On Twitter, ANPI London wrote that “By comparing the Foibe killings with Nazi genocide, the Italian right is whitewashing the country’s past.”

Osvaldo Napoli of the centre-right political party, Cambiamo, said that comparing the persecution of the Jewish people, who were victims of “the Nazi-Fascist genocide,” with the violence of Marshal Tito’s national-communism is “offensive to the Jews who survived the extermination.”

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