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Look up to the top floors to see swanky apartments that command beautiful views of the city center and are occupied by some of the city’s oldest Jewish families.

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The Great Synagogue of Rome, in Italian, is the largest synagogue in all of Rome and possibly all of Italy. This impressive building is pretty new by Roman standards. After people of Jewish faith were granted citizenship during Italian unification in 1870, the original ghetto synagogue was torn down and plans for the Great Synagogue began. The cornerstone was laid in 1901 and the Synagogue was officially completed in 1904, a veritable baby in the Roman skyline.

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Places of arrest are shown with black dots, places of internment in Italy are symbolized by yellow squares, and destination camps are represented by red triangles.

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The national scale: arrest clusters. The clusters identify areas of concentration of arrests. The blue symbols are proportional to the number of arrests at single locations; the largest symbol identifies Rome, with over 1600 arrests. The inset map shows the distribution of Jewish population in 1938; the largest symbol identifies Rome, with over 12,000 residents.

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Close-up view of points of arrest along the Italo-Swiss border of Jewish refugees seeking safe haven in Switzerland.

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24,000 non-Italian Jews in Italy

28,000 Italian Jews in Italy

During the holocaust, 80% of Jews in occupied Europe were executed but in Italy 80% of Jews were saved over a quarter were foreign

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Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini (center) with his top aides. Italy, 1920s.

— National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md.

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Giuseppe Di Porto was born in Rome, Italy in 1923. He was caught by the SS in October 1943 and was deported to Milan. He was sent to Auschwitz and was numbered 167988. In January 1945, Giuseppe was sent out on a death march.  After a three-day march in the snow, the SS men decided that the prisoners were delaying their escape and it would be better to murder them in the forest.  Giuseppe managed to escape the slaughter and join up with Red Army forces in the area. In October 1945, five months after the end of the war, Di Porto returned to his home in Rome.  He married Marissa, who was also a Holocaust survivor, and they became the parents of three children. On the side panel of the suitcase that he found after he escaped from the death march and in which he kept his few belongings, Giuseppe Di Porto wrote down the places and the dates that he passed through from the day of his arrival in Auschwitz until his return to Italy:

Monovitz (Buna) | 11 December 1943
N. 197988 |
Auschwitz III |
Gliwice, Poland | 24 January 1945
Częstochowa, Poland | 01 February 1945
Guirao, Polonia (apparently Góra Siewierska, Poland) | 25 February 1945
Starnao Polonia (apparently Starnice, Poland) | 02 March 1945
Breslavia, Poland | 19 March 1945
Wołczyn, Poland | 24 March 1945
Głogów, Poland | 16 May 1945
Olesnica | 05 June - 05 September 1945
Rome | 08 October 1945

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The suitcase that Giuseppe Di Porto found after escaping the death march

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The details of Giuseppe Di Porto's route from Auschwitz back to Rome, as he inscribed it on the suitcase

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“The Holocaust destroyed communities, displaced millions of people from their homes, and created new kinds of places where prisoners were concentrated, exploited as labor, and put to death in service of the Third Reich’s goal to create a racially pure German empire.” The most familiar aspect of the Holocaust are the concentration camps. In Rome, Italy from September 1943 to February 1945, there was an Italian-Jewish community suffering. It started in 1938, when Benito Mussolini’s Italian Fascist regime “enacted a series of racial laws that placed multiple restrictions on the country’s Jewish population”. In July 1943, Italian Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini was arrested. The new Italian government, headed by Marshal Pietro Badoglio, remained allied with the Germans while secretly negotiating with the Allies.

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Anti-Semitism was never popular in Italy so the persecution of the Jews in Italy never approached the level it reached in Germany. The Vatican did much to protect the Italian Jews from persecution. As a result, Italian Jews survived the war but most of them suffered severe economic dislocation. Overall, there were 24,000 non-Italian Jews and 28,000 Italian Jews in Italy.In part under pressure from Nazi Germany and in part fearing that their “revolution” was not perceived as “real” in the Italian population, the Fascist regime passed anti semitic legislation beginning in 1938. This legislation covered six areas: definition of Jews (how to define Jews), removal of Jews from government jobs, including teachers in the public schools, a ban on marriage between Jews and non-Jews, dismissal of Jews from the armed forces, incarceration of Jews of foreign nationality; and, the removal of Jews from positions in the mass media. “Although reflected in harsh language on paper, Italian authorities did not always aggressively enforce the legislation.” Even in the concentration camps, Jews of foreign nationality lived under bearable conditions (families stayed together and the camps provided schools, cultural activities, and social events). For many individual members of the Jewish minority which had had reasonably good relations with non-Jewish neighbors, the psychological insult and real economic disadvantages of discrimination weakened the quality of life, which made thousands to emigrate (to the Americas) between 1938 and 1942.