(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)April 11, 2013

(MAHWAH, NJ) – Natalia Indrimi, Executive Director of the Centro Primo Levi, New York, spoke on April 11 in the Robert A. Scott Student Center, Friends Hall on “Deconstructing a Hero of the Holocaust.” The Morton and Clara Richmond Endowment underwrote the event and the Italian Club of Ramapo College co-sponsored it together with the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The Coccia Foundation provided a grant to the Italian Club  that enabled it to serve a tasty repast after the program.

Indrimi presented the rationale and preliminary results of a research project promoted by Centro Primo Levi dedicated to reconstructing the life and career of the Italian police officer Giovanni Palatucci (1909-1945).

Giovanni Palatucci

Palatucci, of Montella, Naples was an adjunct deputy police superintendent in Fiume between 1937 and 1944 and died in Dachau in 1945. He was purported to have saved between 5,000 and 8,000 Jews by supporting clandestine emigration through the port of Fiume and by “officially deporting them to the internment camp of Capagna (near Naples).” There, his uncle, Giuseppe Maria Palatucci, was the bishop and allegedly assisted Jewish internees to safety. It was also claimed that in the wake of  the armistice of September 8, 1943, Palatucci saved the Jewish population of Fiume from the German round-ups by alerting the community and destroying police records of more than 5,000 individuals. In 1990, Israel’s Holocaust memorial authority, Yad Vashem,  recognized him as Righteous among the Nations and, in 2001, the Catholic Church opened a process of beatification.

However, as Indrimi clearly demonstrated, most studies on the persecution of Jews in Fiume, Fascist concentration camps and Jewish clandestine emigration from the Adriatic coast contradict the possibility of such massive rescue operations.  Nevertheless, the State of Israel, the Italian government as well as Jewish-American and Italian-American organizations have invested greatly in the celebration of Palatucci’s deeds.

As Indimi described in considerable detail, in 2010 the Centro Primo Levi embarked on a project to arrive at the truth of what had occurred. In the end, a database of hundreds of documents from Italian, Israeli, Croatian, German, American and British archives has been amassed that not only challenges the alleged deeds of Palatucci and his uncle, but also sheds light on the persecution of Jews in fascist Italy as a whole and poses questions about how the story of their alleged heroism was constructed.

Dr. Natalia Indrimi

Indrimi received a degree in Philosophy from the University of Rome La Sapienza. Since 1985, she has developed international cultural partnerships and curated exhibitions and conferences in the U.S., Europe, Australia and Latin America. Between 2001 and 2007, she was the program director of the Center for Jewish History.

Centro Primo Levi (CPL) is the English language portal for Italian Jewish studies and community news connecting the Italian Jewish worlds in Italy, Israel and the U.S. Based at the Center for Jewish History in New York, CPL serves scholars and the general public through resources, programs, networking, exchange opportunities and educational initiatives. CPL’s monthly online publication, “Printed Matter,” features research and current affairs from the Jewish communities of Italy.

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