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The Committee for the Gardens of the Righteous Worldwide – promoted by the Jewish journalist Gabriele Nissim and by the Armenian doctor Pietro Kuciukian – was formed in Milan in the year 2000.
The history of the Twentieth century is marked by the worst crimes against humanity, and genocides are still taking place in the world today. For this reason, the Committee wishes to keep alive the memory of the Righteous, those who opposed Evil and tried to rescue the persecuted and to preserve their own dignity as human beings.
The Committee promotes the creation of parks, woods and gardens all over the world, with the ultimate aim of forming a single, worldwide garden to commemorate the deeds of the Righteous and the value of Good for the history of mankind.
In certain symbolic places, such as Yerevan in Armenia and Sarajevo in Bosnia Herzegovina, memorial gardens have already followed the example of the first Garden of the Righteous planted in Jerusalem, alongside the Yad Vashem memorial, as a tribute to all the non-Jews who opposed the Holocaust.
Milan witnessed the creation of the Gardens of the Righteous Worldwide.
The Committee also wishes to stimulate historical research and thought on the subject of the Righteous in connection with Twentieth century history and with the genocides still rife in the world today. Such research and such thinking should start from the reflections of philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Tzvetan Todorov, of historians and sociologists such as Yehuda Bauer and Zygmunt Bauman, of eye witnesses and writers such as Primo Levi, Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Varlam Salamov.
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