During World War II, the Nazis perpetrated a genocide of Europe’s Roma and Sinti, who they saw as racially inferior and as social outsiders. It is thought that 70-80% of the European community was murdered.
For Romani Genocide Remembrance Day, join us on August 5th, 2024 at noon EST for a virtual discussion with Milovan Pissari, an internationally recognized expert on Holocaust-related topics and the Genocide against the Roma, and Gina Csanyi-Robah, the Executive Director of the Canadian Romani Alliance.
They will discuss Dr. Pisarri’s research about the mechanisms that led to the Roma Genocide in southeastern Europe, the history of anti-Roma racism, and the reasons behind the general lack of interest in the topic.
A Q&A will follow the discussion.
Learn more about our speakers
Milovan Pisarri is an internationally recognized expert on the Holocaust-related topics and the Genocide against the Roma. He received his PhD in Social History at the University of Venice, Italy, with a thesis on the crimes against civilians in Serbia during WWI. In 2018, he founded the Centre for Public History, the remit of which extends to the history of the 20th century in the Balkans and particularly to the Holocaust. He is the author and the coordinator of different international projects on Holocaust research, education, and remembrance.
Gina Csanyi-Robah has been deeply committed to human rights and education for the past 20 years. She is currently a secondary school teacher in the Vancouver School Board, an anti-racism workshop facilitator for the British Columbia Teachers Federation, as well as a leader in the Canadian Roma community. In 2014, Gina co-founded the Canadian Romani Alliance, the first national, non-profit Roma organization in Canada doing public education, advocacy, and community capacity building.
She has been educating about the Roma Genocide during the Holocaust since 2009, and she is a current member of the Canadian delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. On August 2, 2019, the Canadian Government passed a motion to officially recognize the Roma Genocide, becoming the sixth country in the world to do so.
Gina’s social justice and human rights background is rooted in her family history. She is the granddaughter of Hungarian Roma Holocaust survivors and refugees of the Hungarian Revolution. Gina’s family continued to face anti-Gypsy systemic discrimination in Canada, after arriving in 1956.
In 2011, as Executive Director of the Toronto Roma Community Centre where hundreds of newly arrived Roma families were desperately seeking asylum and settlement support, after fleeing endemic discrimination and racially motivated violence in Central Europe. In 2012, Gina was the first Canadian Roma to address the Canadian Parliamentary Committee on Immigration, as well as a Senate Committee. Gina expressed concerns over systemic discrimination and the prejudicial reforms to national immigration policy that directly impacted Roma refugee claimants from Europe, labelled as “Bogus Refugees”. In April 8, 2014, Gina was invited by the UN’s Human Rights Commissioner to speak in Geneva about her community leadership work.
Gina has received numerous awards, in addition to having published opinions, articles and stories in newspapers, journals, and anthologies.
