Le Giornate della memoria in una prospettiva globale

The aim of this essay is to present the main outcomes emerged during an international conference centered around the theme of the Holocaust Memorial Days in the EU, which took place on 13rd and 14th April, 2015 at the Holocaust Memorial in Milan. The main purpose of the conference was to discuss the challenges of the Holocaust commemoration in the XXI century, with a particular reference on the potential uses and misuses of the different memories dealing with Jewish issues. Starting with the analysis of several national case studies, the aim of each paper was to show how this sort of Holocaust public memory has served a specific aggregate function in the building of a common European identity. There are reasons to believe, in fact, that the Holocaust public memory remains the only historical and simbolic landmark commonly shared by the main EU countries. In this paper, I will therefore summarize all the cases presented at the conference, tracing several common questions: how these commemorations took place across the different countries? How these domestic narrations have influenced the issue of specific educational policies? Which relationship exists between these policies and the institutional involvements?