Playing party games at Hanukkah becomes a reminder of the long Jewish history in Greece

Chanukiot with a colourful array of candles at the Chanukah party in Milton Keynes and District Reform Synagogue (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Patrick Comerford

Hanukkah this year began on the evening of Christmas Day, 25 December – coinciding in a rare convergence with Christmas Day for the first time in 19 years – and Wednesday night is the last night of Hanukkah, with the eight days of celebration coming to a close on Thursday (2 January 2025).

I was invited to a Hanukkah party in Milton Keynes and District Reform Synagogue yesterday. Each evening, Jewish families everywhere light the Chanukiah or nine-branch Hanukkah menorah, commemorating both the miraculous lasting of a single day's cruse of oil for eight days in the Temple and the triumphant victory of the Hasmoneans over Antiochos Epiphanes and their Greek oppressors.

A variety of chanukiot, with a colourful array of candles, were lit at the end of yesterday’s party. Traditionally, Sephardic Jews light their chanukiot at nightfall, Ashkenazi Jews light their chanukiot about 12 minutes after the sun has set. Sephardic custom calls for the head of the household to light the menorah for everyone, while Ashkenazi tradition has each family member light their own menorah.

Each night follows a traditional order for lighting, from right to left, adding a new candle to the left each evening, to symbolise how light and holiness should always increase, never diminish and the menorah is placed in a visible place, such as a window facing the street. The last candles will be lit in Jewish households this evening.

At the party on Sunday afternoon, we were served traditional Hanukkah foods, including food fried in oil, commemorating the miracle of the oil cruse, variety of sufganiyot or doughnuts with a variety of fillings, latkes and chocolate coins, and we heard traditional Hanukkah songs in Hebrew, English and Ladino (Ocho Kandelikas).

The Cheder children taught us the significance of playing with dreidels, one of the Hanukkah customs. The dreidel has the Hebrew letters נ (nun), ג (gimel), ה (hey), פ (peh) and ש (shin), representing the initials of the Hebrew phrase ‘A Great Miracle Happened There’.

It is interesting how the story of Hanukkah is so often told as throwing off the shackles of an oppressive Greek ruler. Antiochos Epiphanes (Ἀντίοχος ὁ Ἐπιφανής) claimed to be a successor to Alexander the Great, but was seen by many as a usurper.

His eccentric, cruel and capricious rule included outlawing Jewish religious practices, desecrating the Temple in Jerusalem, setting up a statue of Zeus in the holy of holies and sacrificing a pig. The name Antiochos comes from the city of Antioch, while the title Epiphanes (Ἐπιφανής ) means ‘God Manifest’. But his behaviour led to contemporaries, in a wordplay, to call him Epimanes (Ἐπιμανής, ‘The Mad’).

A menorah in the Monasterioton Synagogue, the only surviving, pre-war working synagogue in Thessaloniki (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

But I wonder how the Jewish community in Greece responds to some traditional presentations of Hanukkah as a conflict between Jews and Greeks.

A new short film from the World Jewish Congress released last week shows how the presence of Jews in Greece predates Antiochos Epiphanes and the Maccabean revolt, going back thousands of years to the Babylonian exile, ca 585 to 549 BCE. Alexander the Great's conquest of the ancient Kingdom of Judah and the incorporation of the region into his empire coincided with the founding of a long-term Jewish community in Greece. Under his rule, the Jewish communities flourished and many lived a largely Hellenised lifestyle, speaking Greek rather than Hebrew. The words synagogue, Pentateuch and Pentecost are Greek, for example.

The Hellenised Jews in Greek-speaking cities such as Alexandria and Antioch were known as ‘Romaniote’ communities. They translated Jewish prayers into Greek and the first translation of the Bible was the Septuagint in Greek. Romaniote communities developed throughout the Byzantine era and many Jews completely assimilated into Greek culture.

The Ottoman Turkish capture of Constantinople in 1453 changed the life of Jews and in the Greek-speaking world. But it also marked the beginning of a Sephardic Jewish presence in Greece, and Ladino eventually language became the official language of Greek Jews.

Thessaloniki became the largest Jewish city in the Mediterranean, with about 50 synagogues and Jews making up more than half of the population, so that the city was known as the ‘Mother of Israel’.

The Jewish Holocaust Memorial at Liberty Square … a bronze sculpture by Nandor Glid of a menorah whose flames are wrapped around human bodies (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

On the eve of the Shoah, over 70,000 Jews lived in Greece and were part of the country’s everyday life and culture. But the Holocaust devastated the Greek Jewish community, and only 10,000 Jews were left in Greece at the end of World War II: 96.5% of the Jewish community had been murdered in the Nazi death camps in Poland. Fewer than 2,000 of the 50,000 Jews of pre-war Thessaloniki survived; almost all the Jews of Rhodes were rounded up and deported to Auschwitz.

The Greek Jewish community today numbers 4,200 to 6,000 people. The majority of Greek Jews live in Athens, followed by Thessaloniki. Jews are also present in Corfu, Chalkis, Ioannina, Larissa, Rhodes, Trikala, Volos and Crete, and 10 active synagogues. In Athens, there are two functioning synagogues opposite each other on the same street – one Romaniote and the other is Sephardic – Thessaloniki has three active synagogues, and there are several Jewish day schools throughout Greece.