In Memory of the Jews of Greece for Yom Hashoah

“I will give them, in My House and within My walls, a monument and a name (Yad Vashem) better than sons or daughters.  I will give them an everlasting name which shall not perish.” Isaiah 56, 5.

Hall of Remembrance,Yad Vashem.
Photo: Berthold Werner 

As night falls this Wednesday in Israel Yom Hashoah - Holocaust Memorial Day will begin.   A state ceremony will take place that evening in Warsaw Ghetto Square at Yad Vashem.  The President and the Prime Minister will speak.  The Chief Rabbis will recite prayers.  Six torches will be lit, each one by a survivor in memory of the six million Jews, almost two thirds of European Jewry, who were murdered in the Holocaust. 

Flags will fly at half-mast that day.  Places of entertainment will close for 24 hours.  The main television channels will broadcast only programmes related to the Holocaust.  The radio stations will carry sombre music.  At 10.00 o’clock on Thursday morning sirens will sound calling the whole country to come to a standstill and to observe two minutes silence in memory of those who died.

Batis Family Plaque
Memorial Cave, Yad Vashem

Millions of Ashkenazi Jews from northern and eastern Europe were murdered during the Holocaust but its terrible impact also reached Italian Jewry and the Sephardi communities of Greece, the Balkans and even North Africa.  One of the survivors who will be lighting a torch at this year’s state ceremony is Artemis Miron.  She was born in Ioannina in Greece.  Her father, Iosif (Pepo) Batis, was arrested, shot and killed in 1943.  Her mother and brother were murdered in Auschwitz in 1944.  Artemis herself survived forced labour in Auschwitz and death marches to Ravensbruck and to Malchow. 

The Jewish community in Greece is the oldest in mainland Europe dating back more than 2,000 years.  The first written record of Jews there is from about 300 BCE.  Synagogues have been discovered from the second century BCE.  In Jerusalem two synagogues have been established by Jews from Greece; one in the Ohel Moshe neighbourhood in Nahlaot and one in the Sephardi Orphanage near to the neighbourhood of Even Israel. 

Beit Knesset Beit Avraham VeOhel Sarah:

Plaque on the wall of
Beit avraham VeOhel Sarah

Ioannina is in North West Greece where Albania, Yugoslavia and the Ionian Sea meet.  There was already a Jewish community there in the days of Alexander the Great and it was in its day the largest Jewish community in Greece.  The community spoke Judeo-Greek (Yevanic) and used the Romaniot rite of prayer, an ancient rite that dated back to Byzantine times. 

Entrance to Beit Avraham VeOhel Sarah

Avraham and Sarah HaCohen came to Jerusalem from Ioannina in 1925.  They had no children.  Avraham died later that year and his widow decided to consecrate their house as a synagogue for Jews from Ioannina whilst she was still alive.  She died 14 years later in 1939 but until then she lived in a modest room at the side of the synagogue.  Nowadays Sephardi Jews pray in this synagogue.  There is no-one to speak Yevanic and the Romaniot rite is almost never heard here. Many religious items from the original community are preserved in the synagogue.

Beit Haknesset Kahal Tzion:

Salonica, The Fortress

Salonica, Thessaloniki, is Greece’s second largest city.  In 1492 thousands of Sephardi Jews settled in Ottoman Greece, many of them in Salonica, following their expulsion from Spain and Portugal.  They quickly became the dominant group and their Judeo-Spanish language (Ladino) became the predominant language of Greek Jewry.  The Sephardim developed Salonica into a major commercial centre.  In the last quarter of the 19^th century 56% of the city’s population was Jewish.  They were so influential that the city virtually shut down each Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath.  Salonica became known as the Jerusalem of the Balkans or as “la madre de Israel” – the mother (city) of Israel.  A street near my home in south Jerusalem is called Kedoshei Saloniki – the holy ones of Salonica.  It is dedicated to the memory of the 50,000 Salonica Jews who were murdered in the holocaust. 

The Sephardi Orphanage, Jerusalem

The Sephardi Orphanage in Jerusalem was established by the Jaffa Road near Even Israel in 1908 by two Bukharian families.  There have been synagogues in the orphanage building ever since its foundation.   In the early days of the 20^th century Jews from Salonica came to settle in Even Israel.  They established a community centre and a synagogue.  At first the synagogue was in the home of Ezra Benveniste.  In the 1920s the community of “Olei Salonica” (immigrants from Salonica) moved their synagogue to the ground floor of the orphanage where it flourished for thirty years until it joined with another synagogue founded there by a Sephardi religious Zionist association called Al Hamishmar (Standing Guard).  Services are still held there every day.

Postscript:

The destruction of Greek Jewry began in 1943.  By the end of the Second World War 60,000 Greek Jews, 86% of the pre-war population had been killed.  Today only about 5,000 Jews live in Greece most of them in Athens and Salonica.  There are just 35 Romaniot Jews alive in Ioannina.