ROME (AP) – An attempt by an Italian Holocaust survivor to encourage other older adults to receive the anti-COVID-19 vaccine has sparked a wave of anti-Semitic comments and other invectives on social media.
Liliana Segre, 90, received the first of a series of two-shot shots in Milan on Thursday. He urged people reaching their age “not to be afraid and take the vaccine.”
“I’m not afraid of the vaccine, I’m afraid of the disease,” Segre remarked.
After Segre’s comments received negative attention from social media, Italian Interior Minister Luciana Lamorgese sympathized with her and denounced the “new and unacceptable attack,” which she said was marked by “a very dangerous mixture of hatred, violence and racism.”
Segre publicly uncovered a shoulder to receive the vaccine injection at a hospital the first day Milan began administering the shots to residents 80 years and older. He said he believed those who refuse to get vaccinated “are too scared or not informed enough.”
“So, as a 90-year-old grandmother, I tell my‘ brothers ’and‘ sisters ’who reach that age not to be afraid and to get the vaccine,” she said.
Segre has one of the highest honors in Italy. In 2018, President Sergio Mattarella turned her into a lifelong senator in honor of her years of talking about the Holocaust with Italian schoolchildren in classrooms across the country.
When German troops occupied Italy during World War II, many of the members of the small Italian Jewish minority were gathered in Rome and elsewhere to deport them.
Segre was one of the few Italian children to survive deportation to a Nazi death camp. She and her family went into hiding after the regime of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini introduced anti-Jewish laws, but was arrested in 1943 and put on trains leaving Milan for Nazi-run camps.
The racist laws of 1938 targeting Jews were abolished with the death of Mussolini in 1945.
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This version has been corrected to show that Segre’s first name is Liliana, not Lilian.