Patrick Comerford
Despite yesterday’s refreshing boost that came with rediscovering and listening to some inspirational Greek songs and music, I am still feeling a little low and more than a little sorry for myself following my surgical procedures in Oxford a week ago.
However, I also took some comfort this week in coming across reports of a new book with recipes for and stories about my favourite Greek food and with recollections of the stories of the Jewish community in Thessaloniki. It is a combination that is balm for my soul: Greek food, reminiscences of Thessaloniki, family history and stories of the Jewish communities in Greece.
In a very peculiar way, I have found Thessaloniki is second only to Crete as the part of Greece that I feel most at home in. I first visited Thessaloniki in 1996 – 80 years after my grandfather had been there during World War I and had been sent home with malaria. Since then, I have returned to Thessaloniki at least half a dozen times, walking in my grandfather’s footsteps, writing from there for The Irish Times, attending academic seminars at the Aristotelean University and exhibition, and exploring the story of the Jewish community in a city that was once known in Ladino as La Madre de Israel or ‘Mother of Israel’ and that once had the largest Jewish community in Europe.
The story of the Jews of Thessaloniki reaches back more than 2,300 years, and the Jewish community was boosted in size with arrival of Sephardic Jews who migrated there after the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492.
During World War II, the Jews of Thessaloniki were forced into a ghetto near the railway lines, and then deported to the concentration camps. On 11 July 1942, known to this day as the ‘Black Shabbat’, all the men of the community between the ages of 18 to 45 were rounded up in Eleftherias Square (Freedom Square) in the city centre. More than 90% of the total Jewish population of the city was murdered in those years, and only 1,200 Jews live there today.
To this day, 80 years after the end of World War II, the descendants of the Jewish communities of Thessaloniki maintain their distinctive language, Ladino, their cultural traditions, their way of praying, their music and their cuisine.
Shaily Lipa was born and raised in Tel Aviv to a Jewish family with Jewish-Greek origin. She is a culinary and lifestyle expert, and a TV personality. She invites her audience to take part in her daily life with cooking and hosting adventures at home through her Instagram account. She has written 11 best-selling cookbooks in Israel, and Yassou: The Simple, Seasonal Mediterranean Cooking of Greece, published earlier this year (11 March 2025), is her first English-language cookbook.
Levana and Angel lived in Israel, but their world was Greek. ‘All of their friends were Greek — from Thessaloniki,’ Shaily explains. They spoke Ladino with one another, played cards together on Friday nights, listened to Greek music, and ate Greek food. Most of their friends, she believes, were Holocaust survivors like her grandfather Angel. He was born in Thessaloniki, but, like most Jews in the city, his family was deported to Auschwitz in 1943.
His parents, two sisters, and one brother died; only Angel and his brother Dario survived. However, the two were separated during the war and did not know that each other had survived until they both reached Puglia in Italy as refugees. Angel lived there in a home with several other Jewish refugees. Eager to find a place to pray, they converted one room into a small synagogue. Angel knew how to write in Hebrew and inscribed the parochet, a curtain that covers the Torah ark, for the small sanctuary.
When Dario heard that another member of his family was alive, he went to the home and spotted his brother’s handwriting on the ark, only to learn that Angel had left for Israel the day before. The two were finally reunited in Israel and built new lives there — including the Shabbat breakfasts at Angel and Levana’s home.
Both of Shaily’s grandparents have died. But her memories of those Shabbat breakfasts remain strong and have had a lasting impact on her. Today, Shaily keeps her grandmother’s tradition alive, hosting Greek Shabbat breakfasts when her family is together, making Greek salad, her grandmother’s white beans, and her own version of spanakopita, which she serves as a large pie.
In her new book, Shaily Lipa recalls how ‘Shabbat breakfast was iconic’ in her family. Every Saturday, they would gather on her grandparents’ balcony for a Greek spread of flaky spanikopita, tangy white bean salad, creamy tzatziki, hard boiled eggs, and a classic horiatiki or Greek salad.
Shaily tells how her Shabbat clothes were always dusted with powdered sugar on Saturday mornings. Her grandparents Levana and Angel hosted the whole family for a Greek Shabbat breakfast on their balcony in Holon, south of Tel Aviv. Before the meal was served, Shaily and her cousins would steal sugar-dusted Greek butter cookies, kourabiedes, from the secret stash their grandmother kept under her bed. But the sugar that dusted their clothes always gave them away.
In a recent interview, she told Jewish Foood Society that when her grandparents lived in Israel, their world was Greek: they spoke Ladino, listened to Greek music, and continued to make the recipes they knew from Thessaloniki where they were born. Their Shabbats have left a lasting impression on Shaily, and inform every page and image in Yassou, in which she celebrates the original Mediterranean diet in a delicious journey.
Greek food embraces abundant fresh vegetables and fish, and includes generous and ample use of olive oil, tomatoes, whole grains, legumes, artisanal cheeses and fruit, accompanied by a healthy glass of wine. In Yassou, the traditions and the rich appeal of this food is captured in the recipes and gorgeous photographs. They include mezes like tzatziki and fried zucchini, through a menu of stuffed vegetables, soups for all seasons, zingy white bean salad with lemon and vinegar, grilled mains like souvlaki, and savoury pies like spanakopita, with 80 dishes in all to prepare, cook, eat and savour.
Now, when Shaily Lipa looks back at those Shabbats at her grandparents’ home, dusted in sugar, she says: ‘I think this is the reason I love Shabbat — thanks to them. I like to host and be social — these are the things I learned from them.’
Shabbat Shalom, Buen Shabat, שבת שלום
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