The Italian Cultural & Community Center of Houston, in collaboration with the Consulate General of Italy in Houston, will host a lecture about Jewish life in Rome, presented by Marla Stone, to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust.

Each year on January 27, the United Nations remembers the many people of Jewish origin affected by the Holocaust and this day is officially called the "International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust (il giorno della memoria).”

Stone’s lecture will present the history of Jewish life in Rome and the Roman Ghetto from its inception in 1555 through the current iteration as a fashionable neighborhood in the city’s historic center. It will look at the evolution of the Jewish Ghetto, its creation under Papal edict, the conditions of life in the Ghetto in the early modern period, its dissolution under the Kingdom of Italy in the late 19th century, and the persecution and deportation of Roman Jews during the Nazi occupation of Italy during World War II.

It will pay special attention to the cycle of persecution, emancipation, and de-emancipation that the Jews of Rome experienced between the 16th century and the 20th century.