In Milan these are days of “Ambrogini d’oro”, the coveted civic honors awarded on the occasion of the patron saint’s festivities. And among the 15 medals this year, one – proposed by Daniele Nahum, municipal councilor of the Reformists and exponent of Action – will go to Roberto Cenati, who was president of the provincial Anpi for a long time, a position he left a few months ago, in March, in dissent from the national leaders of the National Partisans Association who – on the eve of April 25th – defined the Israeli intervention in Gaza as “genocide”.
A conscientious choice, that of Cenati, who in past years has led the most important organization of Italian partisans with balance and wisdom, defending the participation in the Liberation procession of a representation of the Jewish Brigade, which commemorates the glorious formation of Zionist soldiers who in 1944 liberated the country by asserting himself on the Gothic line in Romagna, where many of those soldiers rest today (in the Piangipane cemetery, near Ravenna).
A participation, the Jewish one, which had regularly been the object of thought verbal aggression (thanks to the police it was not also physical) and which in Rome was not possible precisely due to the coldness, or hostility, of a ‘Anpi very different, in orientation, from the Milanese and “Cenatian” one.
A very deserved Ambrogino, therefore, the one assigned to Cenati, who both as president and in the act of leaving his office showed himself as the standard bearer of a serious, noble and unfortunately increasingly rare anti-fascism even in Milan. An important honour: for the Municipality, which awarded it, much more than for the recipient, a meek and courageous man who did and said what he had to out of coherence, out of pure moral and intellectual rigour.
“For us he is a myth – commented Walker Meghnagi – A president of the ANPI who resigns after 12 years because he does not accept the word “genocide”, let alone Ambrogino, deserves much more”. The president of the Jewish Community of Milan, however, was excluded from the Ambrogini. “I’m sorry that the left didn’t understand that it was a historic occasion, giving the Ambrogino d’Oro to the president of the Milanese Jewish community, in general, not for me – he said – It would have been a beautiful thing. But that’s fine. I’m happy anyway.” “It was Meghnagi himself last month, after the news of his candidacy had spread by the municipal councilor and League MEP Silvia Sardone, who took a step back, “to avoid having to give up my values and have to arrive to political discussions that I don’t want to get into,” he explained, recalling that he had recommended: “Don’t give it to me, but to Roberto Have dinner.”