New Documents on the Deportation of the Jews of Rhodes

 On January 29, 2015, at 6 pm Centro Primo Levi with the John Calandra Italian American Institute at CUNY will present a lecture and discussion with Marco Clementi, University of Calabria entitled New Documents on the Deportation of the Jews of Rhodes. The Discovery of the Carabinieri Collection in the Dodecanese State Archive. The program will take place at the Calandra Institute, 25 W 43rd St 17th fl., NYC. Admission is free.

Dr. Clementi will present the first results of the survey conducted on the records of the special bureau of the Italian Carabinieri in Rhodes (today Greece, between 1912 and 1946 Italy).

The archive was unexpectedly discovered in 2011 and identified in 2013. It is now being catalogued through a joint project of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Greek State Archive. The special bureau was a political surveillance office that, between 1932 and 1945, collected information on individuals, businesses, ethnic groups, spies, important events and political personalities. The records, which were thought to be lost, had remained for 66 years in the room where the Carabinieri had left them in 1945.

A high number of these 100,000 files concern the local Jewish community in Rhodes, following the creation of the central governing body of the Italian Jewish communities (UCII) in 1931, to the deportation of July 1944. The Carabinieri recorded information on their lives, business, communal networks, political views and personal behaviors. Their story can now be re-examined under new light based on a much broader evidence of their interactions with the Italian authorities. The documents of the Central Special Bureau are currently been catalogued and digitized by the Greek State Archives and with the support of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Marco Clementi (University of Calabria) received a PhD in Contemporary History from the University of St. Petersburg and holds a degree in Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures from the University "La Sapienza" in Rome. His publications include Storia del dissenso sovietico (2007), L'Alleato Stalin (2011), Camicie Nere sull'Acropoli (2013). He is a member of the St. Petersburg Memorial’s scientific council.

Centro Primo Levi is the recipient of an endowment of the Viterbi Family Foundation in memory of Achille and Maria Viterbi. Programs are made possible through the generous support of the Cahnman Foundation and Claude Ghez.

Please visit Centro Primo Levi’s program series for Holocaust Remembrance