Part 2: The Jewish Legacy: A History of Resilience and Tragedy
Thessaloniki’s Jewish community thrived for centuries but was tragically destroyed during the Nazi occupation in World War II
By John Thomsen
Thessaloniki has for many years been a vibrant city with a keen eye for fashion, filled with beautiful people, delicious foods, great wines, grand vistas, world-class museums, etc. It is also a city with a complicated history from its founding over 2,340 years ago when Zeus was still running the show. The Jewish story in Thessaloniki, which I learned about in greater depth after being taken to the city’s Jewish Museum, is particularly poignant and complicated. If I could, I’d avoid this painful history, but it is much too important to ignore when writing about Thessaloniki.
One very surprising piece of information I discovered at the museum, was that there were very probably Jews who had come to Thessaloniki from Alexandria, Egypt as early as 140 years before Christ.
Over the following centuries Jews from many countries found their way to Thessaloniki, including many Jews from Spain. In 1492, Columbus, as many of us learned in grade school, sailed the ocean blue (from Spain), but what many of us didn’t learn was that in Spain in 1492, thousands of Jews who refused to convert to Christianity were thrown out of the country. Many of these Sephardic Jews traveled over 1000 miles to Thessaloniki to make a new home. Jewish people from other countries also continued to come until the Jewish community made up over half the population of the city and became part of Thessaloniki’s “Golden Age” during the 16th century. At this time the city was also given the name, “Mother of Israel,” by Samuel Usque, a Jewish Italian poet.
In the 17th and 18th centuries Thessaloniki went through upheavals through natural disasters, trade route issues, spiritual divisions, the Janissary military corps, etc.…but in many ways, even through difficult times, the Jewish residents of Thessaloniki preserved their community structure quite well.
Tragically however, in the 20th century, the lives of the Jewish people that had started in Thessaloniki around 140 years before Christ, was destined to be destroyed by the barbaric Nazi forces that arrived in the city in 1941. I discovered from articles in the Jewish Museum that the Nazi’s began their program of destruction and humiliation immediately, and by 1942 all Jewish men between18 and 45 were rounded up, forced into brutal manual labor, and many died. The Nazi’s also confiscated Jewish property, including even the Jewish cemetery containing nearly 500,000 gravestones which they callously used to build roads, public baths, walls for their trenches, etc.…
Finally, in 1943, after Jewish property had been stolen, the entire Jewish population (except for the few who had escaped into the mountains), almost 50,000 children, men, and women, were sent in railroad cars to Nazi death camps. Tens of thousands of these Thessaloniki citizens were gassed to death immediately, thousands of others were worked and starved to death.
Walking through the Jewish Museum it was impossible to wrap my head around the fact that for more than 2000 years the Jews had been a very important part of building the city of Thessaloniki; and that in a matter of months, these innocent people and their rich culture were ruthlessly destroyed by Nazi atrocities.
Join me next week to learn more about the recent history of Thessaloniki.