Jews protest Senate Speaker's marking MSI anniversary

(ANSA) - ROME, DEC 27 - Italian Jews on Tuesday protested the commemoration of the founding of the postwar neofascist Italian Social Movement (MSI) party by former MSI bigwig and current Senate Speaker Ignazio La Russa, saying it was a continuation of a government of Fascist diehards who helped the Nazis take Italian Jews to their death camps.
    On Monday La Russa marked the 76th anniversary of the MSI's founding on December 26 1946 by members of the Fascist WWII Italian Social Republic (RSI), a puppet State of the Nazis.
    La Russa, who collects Fascist memorabilia, said on Instagram he was doing so in the memory of his father, one of the founders of the Sicilian branch of the MSI.
    La Russa is a leading member of Premier Giorgia Meloni's conservative Brothers of Italy (FdI) party. Italy's first woman premier, shortly before she was voted in, once more condemned Fascism for its suspension of democracy and its "odious" racial laws against the Jews.
    The president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI), Noemi Di Segni, said Tuesday that it was "grave" that high-ranking institutional figures like La Russa, whom she did not name, had marked the anniversary of the MSI's founding, "legitimising nostalgic sentiments".
    She said that this was all the more regrettable since Tuesday marked the 75th anniversary of the promulgation of Italy's postwar anti-fascist Constitution.
    "Today we celebrate the 75th anniversary of the primulgation of the Republican Constitution, the affirmation of our antifascist democracy," said Di Segni.
    "And yet there are those who have decided to hail another anniversary, that of the foundation of the MSI, a party which, after the fall of the Fascist regime, placed itself in ideological and political continuity with the RSI, a government of Fascist diehards which actively collaborated in the deportation of Italian Jews.
    "(It is) grave that it is the bearers of high institutional posts that reaffirms this, legitimising those nostalgic sentiments". (ANSA).