According to the chief rabbi of Rome Elio Toaff, Levi had telephoned him, for the first time, ten minutes before the incident (it was the Sabbath) stating that he found it impossible to look at his mother's face - she was ill with cancer - without recalling the faces of people stretched out on benches in Auschwitz. The official conclusion was that he committed suicide, though some claim that the fall was possibly caused by vertigo, since he had complained of suffering from dizzy spells, the side-effect of an operation he had undergone some three weeks earlier.