THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS World War II 'Race for Rome' By PAUL MASSERMAN "The Race for Rome" is a gripping historical work describing one of the key campaigns of World War II. On June 4, 1944, two days before D-Day the Allied Armies liberated Rome. However, the accomplish- ment was overshadowed by the greater impetus of the landing in Normady, on June 6, which dominated the headlines and the his- ma tory books. Dan Kurzman spent three W years gathering material for this Doubleday book, which reads like a novel. He inter- viewed more than 800 peo- ple, read 500 books and studied thousands of docu- ments and he came up with the following revelations: • The details of Hitler's plot to kidnap Pope Pius XII, and to take over the Vatican; • Hitler's blackmail of the Pope which caused him to keep silent about the de- portation and destruction of many of Rome's Jews; • The German plan to de- stroy Rome, deport its peo- ple and turn the city over to the Communists. The book is devoted (with many, many disgressions) to the rivalry and "the race within a race" for Rome be- tween General Mark Clark. commander of the Ameri- can Armies; Sir Harold Al- exander, the British general who commandered the 15th Army Group and the French commander, Gen- eral Alphonse Juin, each trying to be first to enter the Holy City. A Many other personali- ties fill the book, including Chief Rabbi Israel Zolli, who converted to Catholi- cism; SS General Karl Wolff; Princess Enza Pig- natelli Aragona; Baron von Weiszacker, German envoy to the Vatican; Pope Pius XII; SS Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Kappler, the Gestapo chief in Rome; the OSS spy Peter Tomp- kins and many others. The final race for Rome took less than four weeks — from May 11 to June 4 — but Kurzman depicts the en- tire nine-month campaign, which began with the Allied landing in Italy in ,Septem- ber, 1943. The route from the boot of Italy was con- tested fiercely at Salerno, the Volturno, the Rapidan, Cassino and at the Anzio eachhead. Kurzman devotes a chap- ter to the Jews of Rome, who numbered about 8,000. The author quotes Rabbi Zolli as claiming that he tried to warn the Jewish leaders of the Roman com- munity that there would be a bloodbath. Many of the rich Jews left Rome, but the poor re- mained. Rabbi Zolli was among those who hid, and _ was removed from his post. On Sept. 26, 1944, a little more than two weeks after the Germans had taken Rome Lt. Col. Kappler called in the Jewish leaders and demanded a ransom of 50 kilos of gold. (Kappler claimed he did this in order to avert the planned expul- sion and destruction of the Jews to prove to Heinrich Himmler that Jews could be useful as a source of loot). The gold was never used by the Nazis and was dis- covered stored away in an office. The gold was col- lected by the Jewish com- munity itself, even though the Vatican had agreed to lend gold. Meanwhile, the Nazis had raided the Jewish com- munal offices and seized lists containing the names of all the affiliated Jews in Rome. The Jews breathed more easily after the ran- som was paid. However, on Oct. 16, 1944, the Nazis staged a sudden roundup. The Vatican re- mained silent as more than 2,000 Jews were loaded in freight cars and shipped to Auschwitz, where within less than two weeks they were incinerated. Zolli was reinstated when the Allies reconquered the city but the Jewish commu- nity was bitterly split and Zolli's assistant, Rabbi David Pancieri, pulled him from his seat on the pulpit and. declared that it no longer belonged to him. -Zolli then began secretly to take Catholic instruc- tion while remaining in his position as chief rabbi of Rome. On Feb. 13, 1945, Israel Zolli and his wife received the sacrament of baptism. Jews were shocked at first, but his conversion seemed to unite the Jewish community to reaffirm its faith. Zolli changed his first name from Israel to "Eu- genio" in honor of the Pope and took a job at a small sal- Booklet Lists Jewish Patriots NEW YORK — A booklet citing Jewish patriots in American history has just been published here by the Joseph Jacobs Organization, sponsored by Maxwell House Coffee. The booklet is published in commemora- tion of the Bicentennial. The 19-page booklet be- gins with a brief description of the arrival of the first known Jewish settler in the U.S., Jacob Barsimson, who arrived here in 1654. Bar- simson won several conces- sions for Jews from the then governor, Peter- Stuyvesant. Also included is the weal- thy Touro family, which is memorialized by the Touro Synagogue in Newport, R.I., the oldest existing syn- agogue in the U.S. Among the notables in- cluded in the booklet are Uriah P. Levy, Judah P. Benjamin and Ernestine L. Rose, one of the 19th Century's most progres- sive women. For copies of the booklet, at 50 cents each, write Jew- ish Patriots, Box 4488 Grand Central Station, New York, N.Y. 10017. ary in the Vatican Library. Some say that he helped to influence the revision of cer- tain passages in the New Testament that had re- flected unfavorably on the Jews. Zolli died in 1956 a "lonely and impoverished man." Kurzman, a former Washington Post corre- spondent, is an award win- ning journalist and the au- thor of four widely acclaimed books, including "Genesis 1948," the brilliant account of Israel's War of Independence, which be- came a best seller. In "The Race for Rome", he has uncovered many facts hitherto unrev- ealed. He interweaves the threads of panic, terror and desperation inside Rome with vivid glimpses of the final Allied drive for the city, which in some cases had a serio-comic as- pect. The Americans won the race. There are so many char- acters that the narrative sometimes becomes con- fused, and the chronology becomes blurred. However, the virtues of the book far outweigh the faults. Kurz- man makes history live. "The Race for Rome" is an unforgettable experience for the reader. Jewish Law School Plans Fall Opening NEW YORK — The trou- bled Touro Law School, ded- icated to the study of Jewish Law, has announced that it will open its doors in the fall to an initial class of 65, plus 15 graduate students. Yale Prof. Eugene V. Ros- tow, Touro's director of planning, said the school was originally scheduled to open at the time of the out- break of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. A later set-back was the withdrawal of a multi-mil- lion dollar pledge by bene- factor Samuel H. Wang, because Touro's chairman, Eugene Hollander, was in- volved in a nursing home scandal in New York. 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