Florence honors Holocaust victims with stumbling stones

Florence, Italy along with the local Jewish community honored the city’s Jews killed in the Holocaust with a series of stumbling stones.

The memorial commemorates the Jews of Florence deported to concentration camps in 1944 with the addition of 25 stumbling stones (“pietre di inciampo”) installed in sidewalks to go along with the 50 installed in January 2019, Moked reported.

Stumbling stones, or Stolpersteine, were first created by German artist Gunter Demnig in 1992 to commemorate victims of the Holocaust at their last known place of residence. As of December 2019, 75,000 stumbling stones had been placed.

The addition of the new Florence stumbling stones comes shortly before Holocaust Remembrance day on January 27.

The new stones also include a tribute to German Expressionist painter Rudolf Levy (1975-1944) who left Germany in the 1930s due to Nazi persecution and sought shelter in Rapallo, Italy, Mallorca, Spain, New York and in an artist’s colony in the Gulf of Naples. In the 1940s, after hiding in the house of a friend in Florence, he was discovered and arrested by the SS. He died in a transport on the way to Auschwitz.

The new stumbling stones have been placed in front of the home of victims of the Holocaust.