Patrick Comerford
The Holocaust Museum of Corfu is a new museum that opened as a virtual museum earlier this month. It is the first virtual museum on the Greek Ionian island and the organisers hope that in time it will also become a physical museum too.
The Holocaust Museum of Corfu was established in 2025 as a result of over a decade of travel, research and hard work. Its role is to help people remember and understand the Holocaust, as well as the atrocities and horrors associated with it.
As I watched the Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations in Auschwitz earlier this week (27 January 2025), marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on 27 January 1945, and took part in the commemorations in Milton Keynes the previous day, I recalled my visit to Auschwitz at the end of 2016. But I also thought of my visits in recent years to many Holocaust museums and memorials, including those in Berlin, Paris, Porto, Thessaloniki, Venice and Vienna.
The launch of the Holocaust Museum of Corfu this month also reminded me of the Memorial to the Jewish Holocaust Victims from Corfu (Μνημείο Εβραϊκού Ολοκαυτώματος Κερκύρα). It commemorates the 2,000 Jewish people of the island who died in Auschwitz-Birkenau in June 1944.
The Holocaust Memorial is a bronze sculpture by Georgios Karahalios. It was erected in 2001 by the city of Corfu and the Jewish community and dedicated on 25 November 2001.
The sculpture by Georgios Karahalios of a family is set on a large rough stone base in the middle of Plateia Neou Frouriou (New Fortress Square), a small square off Solomou Street. The square, surrounded by cafés and restaurants, is in the north of the old town, near the port. It is about three minutes’ walk from the last remaining synagogue and an area that was at the heart of Jewish community life in Corfu before World War II.
The Holocaust memorial shows a family of four naked figures – a father and mother with their two small children. The mother is cradling an infant, the father has outspread arms with the young boy at his side, leaning his head and arm against his father’s hip and hiding his face from viewers.
Two stone plaques at the base of the monument have inscriptions in Greek and English:
Never again for any nation
Dedicated to the memory of the
2000 Jews of Corfu who perished
in the Nazi concentration camps of
Auschwitz and Birkenau in June 1944
by the Municipality
and the Jewish Community of Corfu
November 2001
About 2,000 Jews were living on Corfu before World War II began. The Italian occupation of Corfu lasted for two years (1941-1943) and was a difficult period for everyone, with shortages and starvation. Following the destruction of one synagogue in bombing, the two Jewish communities in Corfu, Greek and Italian, merged and all Jews on Corfu prayed in the Greek synagogue or La Scuola Greca on Velisariou Street.
All this changed when the Germans took control of the island. Italy surrendered to the Allies in September 1943, the Italian garrison withdrew from Corfu, and German forces occupied the island from 27 September 1943.
The SS soon planned to eliminate the Jewish community. On 9 June 1944, all Jewish families in Corfu were rounded up in the Kato Plateia (lower square) and taken to the ‘Ferrario’ or Old Fortress. They were forced to surrender all their valuables and the keys to their houses, which were then plundered.
About 200 Jews, mostly women, managed to avoid the German roundup and escaped to villages in the interior of the island, where they were hidden by friends.
On 11 June, 300 Jewish women were transported on a barge to Igoumenitsa and then on trucks to Athens. On 14 June, all Jewish men, with the remaining women, were sent on barges to Patras, then to Piraeus, and then on to the Haidari concentration camp in Athens. There they were crammed onto cattle trucks, with no water and little food.
After a horrific nine-day journey, 1,800 members of the Jewish community from Corfu reached Auschwitz-Birkenau on 30 June 1944. Immediately, 1,600 were sent to the gas chambers and the crematoria; only 200 were selected for work. Very few of them, almost all of them young, survived Auschwitz and the death marches to Germany.
After the war, a small community of survivors came together, centred around the surviving but ruined 17th-century Nuova or New Synagogue. The synagogue has since been restored.
The Nuova or New Synagogue at 4 Velissariou Street was one of three synagogues in Corfu before World War II, but the only one to survive the Holocuast.
A second Holocaust memorial in Corfu is in the Nuova Synagogue. It commemorates the 2,000 Jews from Corfu who perished in Auschwtiz and Birkenau, but lists 71 family names. To list all the victims would have been an overpowering if not impossible task.
The family names on the plaque are: Aaron, Aboaf, Akko, Alchavas, Amar, Asias, Asser, Balestra, Bakkolas Baruch, Belleli, Benakim, Ben Giat, Besso, Cavaliero, Cesana, Con, Dalmedigos, Dentes, Etan, Elia, Eliezer, Eskapas, Ferro, Forte, Gani, Gerson, Gikas, Haim, Israel, Jessula, Johanna, Kolonimos, Koulias, Konstantini, Lemous, Leoncini, Levi, Mandolin, Matathias, Mazza, Minerho, Mizan, Mizrahi, Mordo, Moustaki, Nacamouli, Nahmias, Nacson, Negrin, Nikokiris, Osmo, Ovadia, Perez, Pitson, Politi, Raphael, Razon, Romano, Sardas, Sasen, Serneine, Sinigalia, Sussis, Shoel, Varon, Ventura, Vital, Vitali, Vivante, Zaccar.
A third memorial in Corfu with associations with the Holocaust is outside the Church of Aghios Spyridon, the patron saint of the island. A bust outside the church commemorates Bishop Methodius Kontostanos, who was Metropolitan of Corfu and Paxos for 30 years from 1942 to 1972, including the years during the occuptaion of Corfu by Nazi Germany.
Bishop Methodios regularly attended all the High Holyday services at the Greek synagogue in Corfu and was a faithful witness against antisemitism during and after the Holocaust.
In his consistent witness, Bishop Methodios was a worthy successor to the first Bishop of Corfu, Saint Arsenios, who died in 800, or perhaps in 959, and who is one of the principal patron saints of Corfu along with Saint Spyridon. He was born in Constantinople to the Jewish parents. After becoming a Christian, he became the first Bishop of Corfu.
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
