Meeting of Rome’s Jewish Leaders and Leftwing Union Marks a Step Forward in Their Relations

The first meeting between leaders of Rome’s Jewish community and the powerful leftwing Italian General Confederation of Labor yesterday marked an important step forward in the relations between Roman Jews and the labor movement.

The Italian left has been accused by Jews here of having actively fostered the climate of anti-Semitism that led to the bombing of Rome’s main synagogue on October 9 in which a two-year-old child was killed and 37 persons were wounded.

After the Jewish community’s initial shock at the tragedy and its self-imposed withdrawal from the rest of the city, Roman Jewish leaders cautiously accepted the idea that it would be beneficial to have meetings with labor leaders so that each side could engage in some soul-searching about the anti-Semitic climate in Italy and the responsibility each side had in finding ways to work together to eliminate that climate.

PLAN TO COMBAT ANTI-SEMITISM

At yesterday’s meeting, attended by Chief Rabbi Elio Toaff and labor leader Luciano Lama, along with experts from both sides, the Confederation of Labor announced a concrete plan of action to combat anti-Semitism at a forthcoming meeting between the Jewish community and the all-embracing Federation of Italian Unions.

One element of the plan calls for an initiative on the part of city officials, teachers, students and parents to be more attentive to the selection of textbooks which avoid distortions of Jewish history and to reject those textbooks that present “distorted information on the Jewish question” and contain “stereotypes and generalizations.” This effort would also include the eventual replacement of the current standardized teaching of religion — Catholicism — with the teaching of “the, history of religions” in public schools.

The plan also calls for the “restoration of the ghetto which is to be considered one of the most interesting areas of the historical urban center”; and for cooperation between the Jewish institutions and the mass media to develop a project on the Jews in Rome that would include a photographic exhibition of Roman Jewish life from 1870 to today.

Another element of the plan is for the knowledge of Jewish history and culture — “an important part of the city’s life” — to be presented to all segments of Rome’s society in an organized way through conferences, debates, exhibitions and the conservation of the city’s Jewish cultural heritage. This would include the “delicate relations between Christian and Jewish culture in Rome.”

The plan was developed, Toaff and Lama pointed out, in the belief that incipient working class anti-Semitism, which they cautioned should “be neither exaggerated nor minimized,” is best fought with the tools of education.