SW News: A new report from Yad Vashem, the Vatican, Italian Jewish community reveals that Catholic convents and monasteries in Rome sheltered Jews during World War II, providing names of at least 3,200 Jews whose identities have been corroborated by the city’s Jewish community.

The findings were presented during a Thursday academic workshop held at the Museum of the Shoah, a section of Rome's biggest synagogue, by researchers from the Vatican's Pontifical Biblical Institute, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Study Institute, and Rome's Jewish community.

The records were found at the Biblical Institute's archives, which are connected to the Pontifical Gregorian University, managed by the Jesuits.

It includes a list of more than 4,300 individuals who were housed in the buildings of 55 men's and 100 women's Catholic religious organizations. Analysis of the records of the Roman Jewish community reveals that 3,200 of 3,600 identified by name were Jews. “Of the latter, it is known where they were hidden and, in certain circumstances, where they lived before the 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,” the statement added.

To safeguard the privacy of the individuals and their descendants, the names were withheld, it was said. It is unknown if any of the Jews on the list were baptized. According to the book "The Pope at War," by Brown University anthropologist David Kertzer, recently accessible Vatican archives reveal that the Vatican strove hardest to save Jews who had converted to Catholicism or were offspring of Catholic-Jewish mixed marriages.

The Jewish community in Rome suffered horrendous persecution from September 1943 until the city was liberated in June 1944 during the Nazi occupation. Out of an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 Jews in Rome, sadly, almost 2,000 people, including hundreds of children and teenagers, were deported and slaughtered during this terrible time. After Rome was liberated by the Allies in June 1944, Italian Jesuit Fr. Gozzolino Birolo painstakingly put together the documents between that time and the spring of 1945. Notably, from 1930 until his passing in June 1945, Fr. Birolo held the position of bursar at the Pontifical Biblical Institute.