Researchers have discovered new documentation that substantiates reports that Catholic convents and monasteries in Rome sheltered Jews during World War II, providing names of at least 3,200 Jews whose identities have been corroborated by the city’s Jewish community, officials said on Thursday.
Researchers from the Pontifical Biblical Institute, Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust research institute and Rome’s Jewish community released the findings at an academic conference Thursday held at the Museum of the Shoah, part of Rome’s main synagogue. The documentation doesn’t appear to shed any new light on the role of Pope Pius XII during the Nazi occupation of Rome. Historians have long debated Pius’ legacy, with supporters insisting he used quiet diplomacy to save Jewish lives and critics saying he remained silent as Roman Jews were rounded up and deported from the Vatican’s backyard.
Rather, the new documentation provides names and addresses of people who were sheltered in Catholic institutions during the war, which had only previously been reported in vague terms and numbers by Italy’s preeminent historian of the period, Renzo de Felice, in a 1961 book, according to a joint statement from the Pontifical Biblical Institute, Yad Vashem and Rome’s Jewish Community.
The documentation was discovered in the archives of the Biblical Institute, which is affiliated with the Jesuit-run Pontifical Gregorian University. It lists more than 4,300 people who were sheltered in the properties of 100 women’s and 55 men’s religious orders. Of those, 3,600 are identified by name, and research in the archives of Rome’s Jewish community “indicates that 3,200 certainly were Jews,” the statement said. “Of the latter it is known where they were hidden and, in certain circumstances, where they lived before the persecution. The documentation thus significantly increases the information on the history of the rescue of Jews in the context of the Catholic institutions of Rome,” the statement said. The names are not being released to protect the privacy of the people and their descendants, it added.
It is unclear whether any of the Jews listed were baptized. Recently opened Vatican archives of the Pius papacy suggest that the Vatican worked hardest to save Jews who had converted to Catholicism or were children of Catholic-Jewish mixed marriages, according to the book “The Pope at War,” by US anthropologist David Kertzer.
