Of the 4,300 people referenced, 3,600 people are identified by name. A comparison with documents in the archive of the Jewish Community of Rome indicates that 3,200 of these were Jews.
The list of Catholic institutions and the number of people they had sheltered was published by a historian in 1961, but the list of names is newly recovered.
There is also information about where the 3,200 Jews were hidden and, in some cases, where they lived before the Nazi 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,” according to a joint press release from the Pontifical Biblical Institute, the Jewish Community of Rome, and Yad Vashem International Institute for Holocaust Research.
The documentation was compiled between June 1944 and spring 1945 by Father Gozzolino Birolo, an Italian Jesuit.
The documents were presented at a workshop at the Museum of the Shoah in Rome on Sept. 7.
