ANNIHILATION!

During the Passover holidays I visited “Jewish” Salonika, the second largest city in Greece and the capital of Macedonia. Since Jews all over the world will be commemorating Holocaust Day tomorrow, we were interested to learn what became of the local Jewish community during WWII. Unbelievably, we were told that 98% of the community perished in concentration camps! 

To compound the tragedy -  the physical extermination of Salonikan Jews was followed by almost total oblivion about the history, influences and accomplishments of the city’s Jews.

The first Jews are thought to have arrived in the region in 513 B.C.E. and remained uninterrupted throughout the Roman and Byzantine eras. However, it was the influx of the 20,000 Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition in 1492 and found refuge in Ottomon Saloniki, which created an autonomous Jewish city. At least two thirds of the total population were Jewish. Salonika was dubbed “Mother of Israel” and “Jerusalem of the Balkans”.

David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak ben-Zvi (both former Prime Ministers) visited Salonika in 1911 to study a functioning Jewish society - which could serve as a model for a future state of Israel.

In 1913 the essentially Jewish city was annexed to Greece from the Ottoman Empire. After Greece achieved independence of the Ottoman Empire, it made the Jews full citizens of the country in the 1920’s.

Following the German occupation during 1941-43, the ancient and vibrant Jewish community of Salonika in Greece was completely destroyed.

The Germans  began with the destruction of the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe - desecrating 500 years of Jewish history and half a million gravestones. The desecration of the dead was part of the Nazi’s plan to dehumanize the living. With the destruction of the Jewish cemetery, the Germans swiftly began transporting the Jews of Salonika to the death camps. Human bones and broken tombstones were used as building materials – by the local Greek government, the Germans, the local churches, and members of the community. 

The following picture depicts the beginning of the end in the ironically named Freedom Square. In July 1942, 9,000 starving Jewish men, aged 18-45 were forced at gunpoint by the German occupiers to assemble in the scorching sun to be registered for forced labour.

It was only in 2014 that the silence about the Jews was suddenly broken when the Greek press triumphantly reported the name of the winner of the Nobel prize for literature, Patrick Modiano, a Jew whose origins are from Salonika. 

The present mayor is the first major figure in Salonika to take concrete and symbolic steps to restore the city’s Jewish heritage.