The words "die dirty Jew" were
found scrawled Monday night outside the home of a woman in
Turin.
The woman, of Jewish origin, is the daughter of a courier for
the partisans in WWII.
The woman, Maria, said "it is a terrible message, especially
on Holocaust Memorial Day".
"These are old terms, passe', but ones which still hurt".
She has filed a complaint to the local police.
DIGOS security police are investigating.
The woman, Maria Bigliani, said Tuesday: "For now I'm not
going to rub out the message. I want to leave i as evidence of a
racist gesture, which should not happen again.
"In my life I have been subjected to stupid and racist
remarks, but I've always answered back. My mother would have
told me to report it to the police, so I did".
The local chapter of partisan association ANPI will hold a
meeting at the women's apartment block in a sign of solidarity
on Tuesday.
There have been several episodes of anti-semitic and race
hate in Italy recently.
Anti-Semitic graffiti was found on Friday morning on a door
of the son of a well-known Holocaust survivor in the
northwestern town of Mondovì near Cuneo, not far from Turin.
"Juden hier" (Jews are here), which was written in German
cities during Nazism, appeared overnight on the door of Aldo
Rolfi, son of Lidia, an Italian partisan fighter who was
deported to the Ravensbruck concentration camp in 1944 and
became a powerful voice denouncing the horror endured by Jews
there after the war.
The woman lived in the Mondovì home until her death in 1996.
The road where the house is located has been named after her.
An apparent increase in cases of anti-Semitism and hate has
caused concern from many quarters.
On Monday, Holocaust remembrance day, President Sergio
Mattarella said the memory of the Holocaust should be a
"constant warning" and accounts of Fascist crimes should not be
watered down.
Milan Mayor Beppe Sala put up on his door the words "Antifa
hier" (Antifascists live here) in solidarity with the Mondovì
case.
On Sunday night, also, a bar run by an Italo-Moroccan
woman near Brescia was broken into by intruders who scrawled an
inverted swastika and "ni**er whore" on the floor.
The incident happened at Rezzato.
The woman found a broken window and the graffiti.
Police are investigating.
"I don't know if I'll reopen the bar," the owner, Madiha
Khtibari, told ANSA.
"Now I'm frightened and upset. I'm struck by the fact that
none of the nearby flats heard the noise and reported it.
For now, the bar is temporarily closed.
"I often got insistent comments from clients and also verbal
threats. That's why I always preferred to be accompanied when I
was opening or closing the bar".
A swastika and anti-semitic messages also appeared on the
walls of a Rome school Tuesday and were immediately cancelled,
Mayor Virgina Raggi said.
"This is a disgraceful act, and the capital does not forget
what happened during the Shoah," she said, referring to the
deportation of Rome's Jews to Nazi death camps.
Culture can provide an answer to hate and intolerance,
President Sergio Mattarella said at the inauguration of the
academic year at the University of Sannio on Tuesday.
"In reference to the pseudo-culture of hatred and intolerance
the answer is here, in this university and other universities,"
he said.
"At a time when the world is full of uncertainties that often
renew themselves and are now alarming, the response to these
distortions lies in culture and the messages that our
universities are able to give".
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