Anti-Israel co-organizers and their rhetoric at last year’s event make attendance at the ceremony “unacceptable,” community leaders said.

By Canaan Lidor, JNS

The organized Jewish Community of Milan in Italy boycotted the main municipal Holocaust commemoration ceremony Monday, citing fears of its abuse to support narratives that accuse Israel of perpetrating a genocide.

The event is not “the appropriate environment to participate in an initiative of this type,” the Jewish Community of Milan wrote in a statement ahead of the event on Monday, Jan. 27, the U.N.-designated International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

“Dialogue with the younger generations requires sharing and serenity, conditions lacking in last year’s event as well as on other occasions due to excessive politicization of some of the associations” that are also involved in Monday’s event, the statement read.

New leadership at the National Association of Italian Partisans’ branch in Milan, which is a prominent co-organizer of Holocaust commemoration events, has taken that organization on an anti-Israel course that makes it unacceptable as a partner for commemoration, Davide Romano, the director of the Museum of the Jewish Brigade in Milan, told JNS.

Roberto Cenati, the Milan branch’s previous president, resigned last year in protest against the anti-Israel positions adopted by the national leadership of the movement, whose branch he had headed in Milan.

The Milan branch’s current president, Primo Minelli, dismissed the concerns of the Jewish community. “We don’t take orders from anyone and we don’t let ourselves be intimidated. The battle against antisemitism is a fundamental battle for us, which we fight not only on Jan. 27 but 365 days a year,” he told the ANSA news agency.

Walker Meghnagi, the Milan community’s president, told La Stampa: “You cannot take different positions because memory is one. We need common sense. It is useless to pretend nothing is happening.”

At last year’s event in Milan, a speaker for the Association of Former Deportees spoke about the “genocide in Palestine,” Romano said.

“The decision [to sit out this year’s event]was made because since Oct. 7, 2023, we had a lot of people screaming about genocide in Gaza, including some of the associations that are involved in today’s event,” he continued.

The boycott comes to “say that it’s unacceptable to co-organize Holocaust commemoration one day, and celebrate as friends of Hamas and Hezbollah the next day,” said Romano.