COMERFORD WAY: Patrick Comerford’s online journal on Anglicanism, theology, spirituality, history, architecture, travel, poetry, beach walks ... and more
The Jewish Holocaust Memorial in Eleftherias Square (Liberty Square), Thessaloniki … a bronze sculpture by Nandor Glid of a menorah whose flames are wrapped around human bodies (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Patrick Comerford
I was recalling last week how I came across a collection of photographs of modern sculptures in the streets and parks of Thessaloniki and how I realised that I had written little about these sculptures over the years.
Rather than leave the photographs and memories in forgotten files on my laptop or in the cloud, I started an occasional series of blog postings on some of those modern sculptures I have rediscovered in Thessaloniki. Over the next few weeks, I am inviting you to join me in a minor odyssey of recovery and discovery as my mind wanders through Thessaloniki, looking at these sculptures again.
The Monument for the Jewish Holocaust on the edge of Eleftherias Square is a sculpture in bronze with faltering human figures in the shape of a seven-light lamp or menorah, a flame that symbolises destruction, a cloud representing the angels who witnessed the slaughter, and a tree symbolising rebirth and hope. All these figures are represented by intertwined human forms and shapes.
By 1940, Thessaloniki had a Jewish population of about 56,000 in a city that had grown to about 250,000 residents. The community had survived fires, political upheaval, and demographic transformation, they kept open their synagogues, schools and cultural institutions, and they remained a vital part of the city’s fabric. But nothing prepared them for what came next.
On 9 April 1941, German forces occupied Thessaloniki. Within a week, Nazi authorities arrested Jewish community leaders, confiscated Jewish homes and hospitals, and began the systematic looting of Jewish cultural property. Tens of thousands of books, religious artifacts, and artworks were shipped to Germany.
On 11 July 1942 – a date remembered to this day as ‘Black Saturday’ or as the ‘Black Shabbat’ – the Nazis forcibly rounded up 9,000 Jewish men aged between 18 and 45 in Plateia Eleftherias (Πλατεία Ελευθερίας, Liberty Square). For hours in the blazing summer heat, German soldiers beat and humiliated them before the crowds. About 2,000 were sent to forced labour. The rest were eventually ransomed by the community, which sold its ancient cemetery to raise the demanded sum.
The Jewish cemetery, with 20 generations and over 500 years of burials, was destroyed. The tombstones were purloined as building materials for footpaths, university stairs, and barrack latrines. Aristotle University now stands where the Jewish dead had been buried rested.
In February 1943, Adolf Eichmann sent Dieter Wisliceny and Alois Brunner to Thessaloniki. They were specialists in Jewish deportation and they implemented the Nuremberg Laws immediately, imposing yellow stars, movement restrictions, property confiscation. Within days, Jews were forced into three ghettos. The largest, the Baron Hirsch transit camp, was beside the railway station.
The tracks to Auschwitz … old railway tracks at the port where the convoys left for the death camps (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
The first train left Thessaloniki on 15 March 1943. Between March and August 1943, 19 trains took as many as 46,000 Jews from Thessaloniki to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Each train held 1,000 to 4,000 people crammed into cattle cars. The seven-day journey across Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, Austria, and Czechoslovakia was torture itself, with no food, no water and no sanitation, bodies crushed together in suffocating heat or freezing cold.
When the trains arrived at Auschwitz, SS doctors carried out ‘selections’ on the platform. Most were sent directly to gas chambers. Of the 46,000 deported, about 1,950 or 4 per cent survived. The Jewish population that had comprised 68 per cent of Thessaloniki in 1613; 96 per cent of the city’s Jewish population was exterminated in 1943. In five months, the Nazis accomplished what four centuries of disasters – plagues, fires, wars, and economic transformations – had failed to do: they destroyed the Jerusalem of the Balkans.
The survivors who returned found a ghost community. Fewer than 2,000 Jews remained in Thessaloniki. Their synagogues were destroyed or vandalised, their homes had become the homes of others, their cemetery was razed, their archives were burned, their commercial networks were shattered. Many survivors could not bear to stay and emigrated to Palestine, the USA or other diaspora communities. Others rebuilt what they could, establishing small institutions to preserve memory.
About 1,000 Jews live in Thessaloniki today – less than 0.2 per cent of the city’s population of over 800,000. Three synagogues remain of the original 42. The Monastir Synagogue survived only because Nazis used it as a Red Cross warehouse. The Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki, which attracts about 30,000 visitors a year 2023, documents the community’s history.
The Jewish Museum in Thessaloniki … the city was known to Jews as ‘la Madre de Israel’ or ‘the Mother of Israel,’ and to non-Jews as ‘the Jerusalem of the Balkans’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
The Holocaust memorial by Nandor Glid was erected in 2008 at Eleftherias Square (Liberty Square), where Jewish men were beaten on Black Saturday. Nandor Glid was a Serbian Jewish sculptor whose father and family members were murdered in Auschwitz. However, Glid did not manage to finish the work, and it was completed by his son. There is a similar sculpture by the artist in Dachau concentration camp.
There are two inscriptions at the base of the monument, one with the dedication and the date of the unveiling, and the second commemorating the visit of President Katsav Israeli.
The monument has been vandalised several times by antisemites, but it has always been restored. It is the starting point of the annual memorial procession, which ends at the old train station from which thousands of Jews were forced to leave the city for the death camps.
One of Thessaloniki’s last Holocaust survivors, Heinz Kounio, died earlier this year (April 2026) at the age of 98. The Holocaust Museum of Greece (Μουσείο Ολοκαυτώματος Ελλάδος) in Thessaloniki is due to soon. It will be the first museum dedicated specifically to telling the story of Sephardic Jews in the Holocaust.
Next: ‘The Woman of Pindos’ by Kostas Domboulas, Fanarioton Square
The old railway station in Thessaloniki … more than 46,000 Jews were sent by rail to Auschwitz and Belsen in 19 convoys in 1943 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
The Jewish Memorial at the Aristotele University of Thessaloniki, on the site of the city’s ancient Jewish cemetery (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Patrick Comerford
I was recalling earlier this week how I have come across a collection of photographs of modern sculptures in the streets and parks of Thessaloniki and how I realised I had written little about these sculptures over the years.
Rather than leave the photographs and memories in forgotten files on my laptop or in the cloud, I have started an occasional series of blog postings on some of those modern sculptures I have rediscovered in Thessaloniki. Over the next few weeks, I am inviting you to join me in a minor odyssey of recovery and discovery as my mind wanders through Thessaloniki, looking at these sculptures again.
The sculptures I have looked at this week include the monumental statues of Aristotle, Alexander the Great and Eleftherios Venizelos.
Thessaloniki has a number of sculptures and works of public art that reflect the city’s Jewish history, including the Holocaust Memorial, ‘Menorah in Flames 2’, by the Serbian Jewish sculptor Nandor Glid in Eleftherias Square, and the ‘Stolpersteine’ or ‘stumbling stones’, 10x10 cm brass-topped cobblestones by the German artist Gunter Demnig to honour local Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
The Jewish Monument of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki honours the city’s Jewish community and is a reminder of the Jewish cemetery on the site that was destroyed by the Nazis. The monument on the campus also recognises the destruction of the old Jewish cemetery during the Nazi occupation of Greece.
The Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Αριστοτέλειο Πανεπιστήμιο Θεσσαλονίκης (ΑΠΘ, AUTh), often known as the University of Thessaloniki, is the largest university in Greece. It was founded in 1925 and was the first Greek university founded outside of Athens.
The university established a chair in Jewish Studies in 1929, but it was abolished in 1936 under the Metaxas regime. The Jewish cemetery in Thessaloniki was destroyed during the Nazi occupation of Greece, the university campus was built partly on the remains of the cemetery and uprooted gravestones were used as building materials in the university.
The campus of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki was built partly on the remains of the Jewish cemetery and uprooted gravestones were used as building materials (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Thessaloniki was once known as the ‘Mother of Israel’ and the ‘Jerusalem of the Balkans.’ For over three centuries, it was the largest Sephardic Jewish city in the world and the only major European city where Jews formed the majority. But, in the space of five months in 1943, the Nazis erased all that almost completely.
There have been Jews in Thessaloniki since the time of Alexander the Great. But the story of the city’s modern Jewish community begins in 1492, with catastrophe transformed into refuge. When Spain’s Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand expelled all Jews from Spain, between 15,000 and 20,000 Sephardic Jews fled across the Mediterranean. Many settled in Thessaloniki, then a bustling port city in the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II welcomed them. He realised that Spain’s loss could be his empire’s gain. The Jewish refugees brought skills in medicine, printing, textiles, metalwork and international trade, they spoke multiple languages and they had commercial networks spanning continents. ‘The Spanish king is a fool,’ Bayezid reportedly said, ‘impoverishing his own country to enrich mine.’
The Sephardic Jews transformed Thessaloniki. They established the city’s first printing press, making Thessaloniki a centre of Jewish scholarship and publishing. They built synagogues – eventually 42 of them – each named after the Spanish or Portuguese city their founders had fled: Catalán Yashan (Old Catalan), Aragon, Lisboa, Evora, Castile.
They created networks that made Thessaloniki one of the most important trading hubs in the Ottoman Empire. Jewish merchants shipped wool, silk and ceramics across the Mediterranean, Jewish craftsmen became the exclusive tailors for the Ottoman Janissaries, and Jewish bankers facilitated trade between east and west.
By 1519, just 27 years after the expulsion, Jews made up 56 per cent of Thessaloniki’s population. By 1613, Jews were 68 per cent of Thessaloniki's population – a percentage unmatched anywhere else in Europe, before or since. This was a living reality into the 20th century: Sabbath observance shut down commerce, rabbinical courts wielded authority, Ladino echoed through marketplaces and Jewish printing presses produced books shipped across the Mediterranean.
For over 300 years, from the 16th to the early 20th century, Jewish life defined the rhythm of life in Thessaloniki. The city effectively shut down from Friday evening until Saturday night, honouring the Jewish Sabbath alongside the Friday prayers of Muslims and the Sunday observance of Christians.
The Ottoman millet system granted religious minorities autonomy. Jewish courts handled civil disputes, rabbinical authorities oversaw education, marriage and religious life, and the community paid collective taxes but otherwise was self-governing.
Jewish entrepreneurs led Thessaloniki’s industrialisation in the mid-19th century. The Allatini brothers established the first modern flour-milling plant in 1854, followed by textile, brickmaking and tobacco factories. By the early 20th century, Jews owned 38 of the city’s 54 largest trading houses, and there was a vibrant Jewish working class too. Jewish stevedores controlled the docks, Jewish weavers supplied textiles throughout the Balkans, and Jewish printers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and merchants filled every sector of urban life.
Thessaloniki became a Jewish intellectual powerhouse. The Alliance Israélite Universelle opened educational institutions that taught French alongside traditional Jewish subjects; a whole generation became conversant with both Jewish tradition and European modernity; and newspapers in Ladino connected the community with Sephardic Jews across the Ottoman world.
Politically, Thessaloniki’s Jews were active in Ottoman reform movements. Many supported the Young Turks revolution of 1908, which sought to modernise the empire with constitutional government. Zionist leaders who visited the city saw it as a model. David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, and Ze’ev Jabotinsky all visited Thessaloniki in the early 20th century, seeing in its Jewish majority a preview of how a Jewish state might work.
The port city closed every Saturday. Most workers – including the dockworkers – were Jewish and observed Shabbat. Street signs were in Ladino, the Judaeo-Spanish language of Sephardic Jews. There were synagogues in almost every neighbourhood, newspapers in four languages served the cosmopolitan population, but Ladino and Greek were the main languages and the dominant voice in the synagogues was Spanish-inflected Hebrew prayers.
But forces were gathering that would unravel its world. Four years before my grandfather’s arrival there, Greece took Thessaloniki in 1912 during the Balkan Wars and incorporated the city in the modern Greek state. The Jewish community – 70,000 strong at the time and the city’s largest ethnic group – faced an uncertain future.
At first, the Greek government recognised the community’s rights and traditions. But tensions simmered, Greek merchants resented Jewish commercial sway, and some people saw the Jewish presence as a remnant of Ottoman rule.
On 18 August 1917, a small kitchen fire in central Thessaloniki exploded into an inferno. For 32 hours, flames consumed over one-third of the city. The fire destroyed 9,500 buildings, and left 70,000 people homeless, 52,000 of them Jews, and 16 of the 33 synagogues were burned. Jewish schools, libraries, charitable institutions, and the grand rabbinate's archives, with the records of centuries of births, marriages and deaths, rabbinical decisions and community history, vanished in smoke.
The entire documented history of one of the world’s great Jewish communities went up in flames, and the fire devastated Jewish Thessaloniki. Over 20,000 Jews, unable to find shelter, left the city for Athens, France, the US and Palestine.
The Jewish Memorial at the Aristotele University of Thessaloniki was designed by the architect Konstantinos Lentaris (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
The community rebuilt itself on the outskirts of the city but never recovered its former glory. The balance in the population shifted dramatically in 1923 when Greece and Turkey negotiated a population exchange. About 1.5 million Greek Orthodox Christians were moved to Greece from Turkey, with roughly 100,000 settling in Thessaloniki. For the first time in four centuries, Jews had become a minority in the city they had once defined.
By 1940, Thessaloniki had a Jewish population of about 56,000 in a city that had grown to about 250,000 residents. The community had survived fires, political upheaval, and demographic transformation, they kept open their synagogues, schools and cultural institutions, and they remained a vital part of the city’s fabric. But nothing prepared them for what came next.
On 9 April 1941, German forces occupied Thessaloniki. Within a week, Nazi authorities arrested Jewish community leaders, confiscated Jewish homes and hospitals, and began the systematic looting of Jewish cultural property. Tens of thousands of books, religious artefacts and works of art were shipped to Germany.
On 11 July 1942 – a date remembered to this day as ‘Black Saturday’ – the Nazis forcibly rounded up 9,000 Jewish men aged between 18 and 45 in Plateia Eleftherias (Πλατεία Ελευθερίας, Liberty Square). For hours in the blazing summer heat, German soldiers beat and humiliated them before the crowds of onlookers. About 2,000 were sent to forced labour. The rest were eventually ransomed by the community, which sold its ancient cemetery to raise the demanded sum.
In December 1942, the Nazis began destroying the Jewish cemetery with 300,000 Jewish graves. The Jewish cemetery, with 20 generations and over 500 years of burials, stretching from Egnatia street to Saranta Ekklisies, was destroyed. The tombstones were purloined as building materials for footpaths, university stairs, and barrack latrines. Aristotle University Thessaloniki was rebuilt where the Jewish dead had been buried.
In February 1943, Eichmann sent Dieter Wisliceny and Alois Brunner to Thessaloniki, specialists in Jewish deportation, to implemented the Nuremberg Laws. They forced people to wear yellow stars, restricted movement and confiscated property, and within days Jews were forced into three ghettos. The largest, the Baron Hirsch transit camp, was beside the railway station.
The first train left Thessaloniki on 15 March 1943. Between March and August 1943, 19 trains took as many as 46,000 Jews from Thessaloniki to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Each train held 1,000 to 4,000 people crammed into cattle cars.
When they arrived at Auschwitz, most people were sent directly to gas chambers. Of the 46,000 deported, about 1,950 or 4 per cent survived; 96 per cent of the city’s Jewish population was exterminated in 1943. In five months, the Nazis accomplished what four centuries of disasters – plagues, fires, wars and economic transformations – had failed to do: they destroyed the ‘Jerusalem of the Balkans’, the ‘Mother of Israel’.
The survivors who returned from the camps found a ghost community. Fewer than 2,000 Jews remained in Thessaloniki, their synagogues were destroyed or vandalised, their homes had become the homes of strangers, their cemetery was razed, their archives were burned, their commercial networks were shattered. Many survivors could not bear to stay and emigrated to Palestine, the US or other diaspora communities. Others rebuilt what they could, establishing small institutions to preserve their memories.
Today, about 1,000 Jews live in Thessaloniki, where they are less than 0.2 per cent of the city’s population of over 800,000. Three synagogues remain of the original 42. The Monastir Synagogue survived only because Nazis had used it as a Red Cross warehouse. The Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki, which attracts about 30,000 visitors a year, documents the community’s history.
Five marble plaques in five languages, recalling, perhaps, the five books of the Torah or the Pentateuch, tell the story of the cemetery and of the monument (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
The Jewish Monument of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, designed by the architect Konstantinos Lentaris, honours the city’s Jewish community and is a reminder of the Jewish cemetery on the site that was destroyed by the Nazis.
The monument, unveiled in November 2014, includes a sarcophagus, a bronze menorah or seven-light lamp, scattered marble plaques with Jewish symbols, and a bronze Star of David. Five marble plaques in five languages, recalling, perhaps, the five books of the Torah or the Pentateuch, tell the story of the former cemetery and of the monument.
The university’s department of Jewish Studies, forced to close in 1936, reopened in 2015 in partnership with the local Jewish community, and now offers courses on Greek-Jewish history, the Holocaust, and Ladino language and culture. Sadly, the monument has been vandalised many times by far-right antisemites.
One of Thessaloniki’s last Holocaust survivors, Heinz Kounio, died earlier this year (16 April 2026) at 98. The Holocaust Museum of Greece (Μουσείο Ολοκαυτώματος Ελλάδος) in Thessaloniki, due to open in coming months, is the first museum dedicated specifically to telling the story of Sephardic Jews in the Holocaust.
Gabriele Keenaghan escaped from Vienna on the eve of World War II and is returning there this week to mark her 100th birthday
Patrick Comerford
Gabriele Keenaghan is a Holocaust survivor and former Kindertransport child who escaped from Vienna on the eve of World War II. She has been decorated for her services to Holocaust education and regularly tells her story in the hope of bringing ‘kindness, tolerance and acceptance of diversity’ to others.
The retired head teacher now lives in North Shields and is one of the oldest survivors of the Shoah to have been evacuated from Nazi-occupied Europe by the Kindertransport. This week she is marking the approach of her 100th birthday by returning to Vienna where she was born in 1926.
I began this occasional blog series, ‘Tales of the Viennese Jews,’ in November 2019. I last returned to this theme earlier this year (16 January 2026) following the death of Eva Schloss, a Holocaust survivor, author, and step-sister of Anne Frank. A year earlier (7 February 2025), I told the stories of Marianne Faithfull (1946-2025), the archetypal ‘wild child’ of the 1960s, and of her mother, Eva Hermine von Sacher-Masoch (1912-1991), a self-styled baroness who resisted the Nazis in Austria.
This occasional series takes its title from the Tales from the Vienna Woods, a waltz by the composer Johann Strauss II (1825-1899), written more than a century and a half ago in 1868. Although Strauss was baptised a Roman Catholic, he was born into a prominent Jewish family. Because the Nazis had a particular penchant for his music, they tried to conceal and even deny the Strauss family’s Jewish identity.
However, the stories of Vienna’s Jews cannot be hidden, and many of these stories are told in the exhibits in the Jewish Museum in its two locations, at the Palais Eskeles on Dorotheergasse and in the Misrachi-Haus in Judenplatz. Rather than describe both museums in detail in one or two postings, I decided after visiting Vienna to re-tell some of these stories through this series, celebrating a culture and a community whose stories should never be forgotten.
A family photograph of the young Gabriele Weiss with her parents, Hildegard and Josef Weiss, in Berlin
The Guardian and the Jewish Chronicle reported earlier this week how Gabriele Keenaghan, a Kindertransport centenarian, is returning to Vienna. She was born Gabriele Franziska Maria Weiss in Vienna on 10 November 1926, an only child who did not even know she was Jewish until after the Nazis invaded Austria.
Her father Josef Weiss was Jewish and manufactured heating stoves. Her mother Hildegard was a Catholic. Family photographs show her as an only child with her parents, and include photographs with her parents in Berlin and visits to the Vienna Woods with her great-aunt Maria who was also her godmother.
After her mother died suddenly in 1935, Gabriele was brought up by her grandmother, also called Gabriele. She never knew her father was Jewish until after Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in the Anschluss on 12 March 1938. She was a boarder at a Catholic convent school when the Nazis came and told the girls they would all be moving.
She was labelled a mischling, a pejorative term meaning ‘mixed’. ‘I was the only one left standing,’ she recalled in an interview with Mark Brown of the Guardian, and she wondered: ‘What’s happening to me?’ She was told she would have to go to a Jewish school and have a yellow star of David sewn on to her coat.
‘They called me “a dirty little Jew” … it was upsetting.’ But, she recalls, ‘I hadn’t realised that my father was a Jew. I didn’t know. I don’t think I even knew what being a Jew meant.’
From then, she was verbally and physically assaulted on her way to and from school, and she was now forbidden from entering the park to play with her friends by a sign declaring ‘Jude Verboten’.
The events of Kristallnacht on 9-10 November 1938 came on the eve of her 12th birthday. Gabriele never saw her father again: he was deported to Łódź in Poland and she believes he either died in the ghetto or was sent to be murdered in Auschwitz.
Her grandmother made arrangements for her to be taken out of Austria on a Kindertransport, the scheme that brought about 10,000 Jewish children to Britain as refugees.
She was still only 12 when she said goodbye to her grandmother and left on a train with 150 other children. They arrived the Netherlands, and from there they were sent by boat to Harwich and on to Liverpool Street station in London.
Gabriele quickly learned English and in January 1940 the Catholic Committee for Refugees moved her from Aldershot to Ashford, where she boarded at the Convent of Notre Dame. When she turned 16 In 1942, she was classified as an ‘enemy alien’ because of her Austrian nationality. She was moved again to a convent in Mill Hill, north London, and then trained in nursery nursing and Montessori education.
One of her first jobs was as a nanny to the Richardson family in Woldingham, Surrey. She has vivid memories of sheltering in air raid shelters during the Blitz in 1940 and 1941 and of VE Day, standing in front of Buckingham Palace.
After World War II, she studied at a teacher training college, and later became headmistress of a school in Newcastle. She met her husband, John ‘Ken’ Keenaghan, an RAF navigator with an Irish Catholic background and stationed in Bedford. They married in 1953 and raised their family in Wallsend. Later she became a middle-school head teacher and has fond memories of her career, the children and her teacher colleagues.
She returned to Austria each year to see relatives, especially her grandmother, who died in 1974.
She is now 99 and her actual 100th birthday is not until November. But she is marking her birthday a little early this year, returning this week with several generations of her family, including her daughters Pat and Christine to Westbahnhof, the train station she left Vienna from almost 90 years ago.
She continues to share her frightening and terrifying childhood experiences and has spoken many times to children about her experiences. ‘I hope they have learned something from it,’ she said this week. ‘But do we ever learn? Look at the world, look at the state it is in now.’
Gabriele Keenaghan told her story in a short book, My Story Gabriele Keenaghan BEM, published by the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR) in 2021 (here).
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
Gabriele Keenaghan in her childhood visiting the Vienna Woods with her great aunt Maria
‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow-slave, as I had mercy on you?’ (Matthew 18: 32-33) … a stained-glass window in Saint Michael’s Church, Limerick (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Patrick Comerford
We are in Ordinary Time in the Church Calendar and this week began with the Eighth Sunday after Trinity (Trinity VIII). The calendar of the Church of England in Common Worship today remembers Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), Bishop of Down and Connor, teacher of the faith; Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), nurse and social reformer; and Octavia Hill (1838-1912), social reformer.
I may stay up late tonight, or early into the morning, to watch the by-election results coming in from Clacton. But, before today begins, I am taking some quiet time this morning to give thanks, for reflection, prayer and for reading in these ways:
1, today’s Gospel reading;
2, a reflection on the Gospel reading;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary;
4, the Collects and Post-Communion prayer of the day.
‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything’ (Matthew 18: 26) … old, worthless banknotes heaped up outside an antiques shop in Rethymnon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Matthew 18: 21 to 19: 1 (NRSVA):
21 Then Peter came and said to him, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ 22 Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.
23 ‘For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. 24 When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him; 25 and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment to be made. 26 So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, “Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.” 27 And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. 28 But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow-slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat, he said, “Pay what you owe.” 29 Then his fellow-slave fell down and pleaded with him, “Have patience with me, and I will pay you.” 30 But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he should pay the debt. 31 When his fellow-slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. 32 Then his lord summoned him and said to him, “You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. 33 Should you not have had mercy on your fellow-slave, as I had mercy on you?” 34 And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he should pay his entire debt. 35 So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.’
1 When Jesus had finished saying these things, he left Galilee and went to the region of Judea beyond the Jordan.
‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything’ (Matthew 18: 29) … a collection of denarii among old Greek coins in an exhibition in Callan, Co Kilkenny (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Today’s Reflections:
The Gospel reading at the Eucharist this morning (Matthew 18: 21 to 19: 1) looks critically at the limits we place on forgiveness and the over-abundant generosity and universal scope of God’s forgiveness.
What are the limits to my capacity to understand and forgive others?
Are there limits to God’s willingness to forgive?
Forgiveness is so central to Christian faith and life, that it is emphasised throughout Saint Matthew’s Gospel.
In this reading, Saint Peter asks how many times he should forgive, and is told ‘not seven times but, I tell you, seventy-seven times,’ or, as some sources put it, seventy times seven.
In Biblical thinking, the number seven always indicates holiness, as in the seventh day, the seventh month, the seventh year or ‘year of release,’ and the Jubilee year that follows seven cycles of seven years.
As the former Chief Rabbi, the late Lord (Jonathan) Sacks, has said, seven is the symbol of the holy, that God exists beyond time and space.
But what about the number 70 when Christ says ‘seven times seventy’ or ‘seventy-seven times’?
Talmudic scholars approach the Torah as if it has ‘seventy faces’ (Numbers Rabbah 13: 15-16). The number 70 has sacred significance in Biblical Hebrew: 70 is the number of people who first went down to Egypt, the elders chosen by Moses, the years of King David, the Babylonian exile, the sages of the Sanhedrin, the translators of the Septuagint, the span of human life, the words of Kiddush, the nations of the world …
The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy points out in The Genius of Judaism that the number 70 is ‘no ordinary number.’ He calls it the ‘secret universal.’ It represents the fullness of humanity, the ‘other universal that escorts human beings on the path of their history and to the centre of their substance.’ It is ‘the number of infinity extended.’
So, Christ tells us in this Gospel reading that divine forgiveness is to be extended ‘seventy-seven times’ or ‘seventy times seven’ – in other words, God’s forgiveness in its abundance is holy in its giving and infinite in its reach.
In the second part of this reading, Christ explains what he is saying in a parable that is unique to Saint Matthew’s Gospel and that involves three distinct episodes:
1, A king decides to settle his accounts with his slaves or servants: the word δοῦλος (doulos) means either, so those who first heard this parable could imagine an end-of-year audit with court officials, financiers or tax collectors. One of these officials owes 10,000 talents, the equivalent to £3,358,735,524 (€3,877,551,979) today. No ordinary slave could accumulate such a debt. Of course, he is unable to clear a debt of such magnitude.
The king might have been reminded that Jewish law prohibits demanding payment from a debtor who is unable to pay (mitzvah 234; Exodus 22: 24). A lender may not embarrass a borrower by harassing him, and is forbidden to seize the debtor’s land or to sell him or his family into slavery.
When the servant seeks forgiveness, the king goes beyond the narrow constraints of rabbinical law, shows overflowing generosity, and agrees to clear off the loan.
2, Now, however, this senior official demands the repayment of a loan of three month’s wages, 100 denarii – about £6,473 (€7,473) today – from a lower-level servant. Imagine the senior official as the line manager for the official who asks for forgiveness. Once again, there is commandment not to take a pledge from a debtor by force (mitzvah 239; Deuteronomy 24: 10). The man already forgiven now refuses to forgive when it is his turn, even his obligation, and he compounds this with his use of force.
3, When the king hears about this, he retracts his original forgiveness.
After telling this parable, Christ identifies the king as God, the first servant as any Christian, and the second as anyone else.
Christ makes the point that God’s forgiveness in its abundance is holy in its giving and infinite in its reach. He calls us to forgive in a way that is so difficult that I am still wrestling with it.
Many of us grew up with language that chided us, so that when we did something wrong and said sorry, we were told, ‘Sorry is not enough’ or ‘Sorry doesn’t fix anything.’ Such phrases allow a hurt person to withhold forgiveness, to find comfort in their own hurt, to control us in a way that allows us to know mercilessly how much we are in need of mercy.
But we also live in a culture of half-hearted apologies that are difficult to forgive. Politicians and business leaders say they accept responsibility by resigning – so they never have to answer for their actions. Half-hearted apologies – ‘I am sorry if I have offended you’ – mean that those who are hurt feel they need to apologise for their response, their reaction, for being hurt.
There are times that I have no right to forgive, when it is not my place to forgive. I cannot forgive the plotters and perpetrators of the Holocaust, because, no matter how many times I have visited places that are an intimate part of the Holocaust story, I am not one of the victims.
I cannot forgive slaveholders or mass murderers in wars and killing fields, because I am not one of their victims. On the other hand, perhaps, because I am not a victim, I might find it is not so difficult.
The true difficulties arise in my own personal life: members of my own family, some of them long-dead, lost friends, once-near neighbours, former work colleagues I think hurt me in the past. I walk around in self-pity with perceived slights, insults and hurts, like some crutch that helps the wounded, broken me to walk through this broken and hurting world.
But then I am reminded, time and again, that God’s forgiveness in its abundance is holy in its giving and infinite in its reach.
‘And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt’ (Matthew 18: 27) … a stained-glass window in Saint Michael’s Church, Limerick (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Today’s Prayers (Thursday 13 August 2026):
In Pray with the World Church, the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), the theme this week (9-15 August 2026, pp 28-29), is ‘Mission to the Mangyans’. This theme was introduced on Sunday with a Programme Update by the Revd Jewel B Tumaliuan, Programme Director, Iglesia Filipina Independiente (IFI).
The USPG Prayer Diary today (Thursday 13 August 2026) invites us to pray:
Lord, we lament the danger and disruption caused by military presence and conflict that makes travel and worship unsafe for the Mangyans. Protect all, we pray. May your church shine as a light in the darkness for many.
The Collect of the Day:
Holy and loving God,
you dwell in the human heart
and make us partakers of the divine nature
in Christ our great high priest:
help us who remember your servant Jeremy Taylor
to put our trust in your heavenly promises
and follow a holy life in virtue and true godliness;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Post-Communion Prayer:
God of truth,
whose Wisdom set her table
and invited us to eat the bread and drink the wine
of the kingdom:
help us to lay aside all foolishness
and to live and walk in the way of insight,
that we may come with Jeremy Taylor to the eternal feast of heaven;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
An icon depicting today’s Gospel reading … the Greek text reads ‘Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid’ (Matthew 14: 27)
Patrick Comerford
This is Ordinary Time in the Church Calendar and today is the Tenth Sunday after Trinity (Trinity X, 9 August 2026). Later this morning, I hope to take part in the Parish Eucharist in Saint Mary and Saint Giles Church, Stony Stratford, leading the intercessions. In these early hours, before today begins, I am taking some quiet time this morning to give thanks, for reflection, prayer and reading in these ways:
1, today’s Gospel reading;
2, a reflection on the Gospel reading;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary;
4, the Collects and Post-Communion prayer of the day.
‘Peace. Be still’ … Christ calming the storm … the Cameron window in Saint Seiriol’s Priory Church, Penmon, Anglesey … see Matthew 14: 22-33 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Matthew 14: 22-33 (NRSVA):
22 Immediately [after feeding the crowd with five loaves and two fish,] he [Jesus] made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. 23 And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, 24 but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. 25 And early in the morning he came walking towards them on the lake. 26 But when the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified, saying, ‘It is a ghost!’ And they cried out in fear. 27 But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, ‘Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.’
28 Peter answered him, ‘Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.’ 29 He said, ‘Come.’ So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came towards Jesus. 30 But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, ‘Lord, save me!’ 31 Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, ‘You of little faith, why did you doubt?’ 32 When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. 33 And those in the boat worshipped him, saying, ‘Truly you are the Son of God.’
‘They got into the boat and went on ahead to the other side’ (Matthew 14: 22) … boats at Messonghi in Corfu (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Today’s Reflections:
The Gospel reading in the Lectionary today (Matthew 14: 22-33) is the same Gospel reading I reflected on last Monday (3 August 2026) and that was an optional reading on Tuesday (4 August 2026). So, I am reflecting on this reading this morning in the light of today marking the 81st anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945.
The bombing of Nagasaki came three days after the bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August, in the closing days of World War II. Within a week, the Japanese emperor had surrendered, and the war came to an end.
Perhaps there was added poignancy in Nagasaki as it was one of the oldest and one of the largest Christian communities in East Asia, and the cathedral was 500 metres from ground zero.
The first use of nuclear weapons was at the ‘Trinity’ test site in the New Mexico desert, at Hiroshima, and at Nagasaki. But this morning, I am asking yet again: what have we learned about war and peace, hatred and justice, since then?
The nuclear arms race continues apace, so that earlier this year [27 January 2026] the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists said the hands on the Doomsday Clock are now at 85 seconds to midnight, making it the closest it has ever been to global catastrophe in its history.
Their warning was issued just a month before the present conflict involving the US and Iran erupted in the Gulf on 28 February and quickly sucked in the rest of the world. When they reset the Doomsday Clock, the scientists said the nuclear threats have increased due to expiring strategic arms control agreements, the lack of replacement treaties, and an aggressive modernisation of arsenals by major nuclear powers.
Other factors include disruptive technologies, with the unmanaged proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) in military simulations and disinformation risks. The climate and global crises, with ongoing extreme weather events, are accelerating ecological damage, and there is inadequate international co-operation.
These are our worst nightmares. As we fall further and further into the pit, into the abyss, we see too a rise in racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia and far-right populism that are fuelled by the Trump regime and funded and cheered on by people like Elon Musk and platforms such as X (formerly Twitter).
Too much money is being spent on the arms race and hatred, not enough on hospitals, health care and reaching out to one another.
Ever since the pandemic lockdown, many people have seen themselves descending to social, spiritual and psychological depths that in the past were known only at times of great and intimate crises, such as family tragedies.
Social and spiritual isolation seem to have brought many people deeper into the abyss, and since then many people have asked: ‘Where is God in all this?’
This is the context in which I find myself reading today’s lectionary readings. In the Epistle reading (Romans 10: 5-15), Saint Paul asks, ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ (verse 7), a reference from the Septuagint (Deuteronomy 30) to crossing the seas. Saint Paul too knows that descending to the abyss is not the end: it leads to the end of oppression and to liberation and freedom.
Each and every one of us is overwhelmed by the pressures of life, by the demands of others, by the state of the world today. Yet we can believe, with the benefit of hindsight and through faith, that God is not neglecting his people.
In the Gospel reading (Matthew 14: 22-33), the disciples feel abandoned as they face their worst fears and face the abyss in the sea, the fear of drowning in the storms of life, of falling into the pit.
It is early in the morning, before dawn, and the boat is far from the shore when it is battered by waves and the wind. The disciples have lost control and are frightened. They see Jesus walking on the sea, and are terrified even more, thinking they are seeing a ghost. They cry out in their fears, but Jesus seeks to calm their fears: ‘Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.’
In other Gospel accounts, Jesus says, ‘Peace! Be still!’ (see Mark 4: 39).
Both frightened humanity and disorderly nature listen to the word and obey. In their response, the disciples acknowledge Christ as ‘the Son of God’ (verse 33). He is in control of their fears and of the created order, offering to bring a new creation out of chaos and darkness.
Growing complacency and adversarial, nationalistic rhetoric among global leaders are undermining multilateral safety frameworks, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has warned.
But concern for the plight of the world in these dangerous times is not an add-on to mission – it is at the very heart of mission. Two of the five marks of mission – hallmarks of Anglican identity and mission – are ‘to challenge violence of every kind and pursue peace and reconciliation’ and ‘to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation, and sustain and renew the life of the earth.’
In words quoted some years ago by Helen Mirren and written inside Anne Frank’s Diary, we must ‘be kind and have courage.’
One of the collects in Common Worship today prays: ‘Lord of heaven and earth, as Jesus taught his disciples to be persistent in prayer, give us patience and courage never to lose hope, but always to bring our prayers before you; through Jesus Christ our Lord.’
There is no need to fear the abyss, the pit, the nightmares we face now, 81 years after the Holocaust and Nagasaki. We are in this boat together as disciples, and Christ offers the hope he brings with calming the storm, a way out of chaos and darkness into light and peace.
‘When they got into the boat, the wind ceased’ (Matthew 14: 32) … a gondolier on the Grand Canal in Venice (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Today’s Prayers (Sunday 9 August 2026, Trinity X):
In Pray with the World Church, the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), the theme this week (9-15 August 2026, pp 28-29), is ‘Mission to the Mangyans’. This theme is introduced today with a Programme Update by the Revd Jewel B Tumaliuan, Programme Director, Iglesia Filipina Independiente (IFI):
Nanay Norma Abnay is a lay leader in the IFI Church and a member of the Mangyan, an Indigenous people of Mindoro. She lives in Panhulugan, a remote mountain village on the island of Mindoro in the Philippines.
Access to healthcare is one of the greatest challenges for the community, with travel to medical treatment often long and difficult, and river crossings becoming impossible during the rainy season.
Bishop Ronelio, who began working with Mangyan communities in 1995, adds, ‘Sometimes we cannot reach certain communities due to security threats from armed conflict. If there is an encounter, we cannot be present at the chapels, which makes gathering very difficult.’ Despite these dangers, local leaders like Nanay Norma are given training to ensure that worship and care continue, helping the community remain resilient and looked after.
She explains, ‘When we first got to know IFI, we were given a church, and we already had a good feeling about it. As a lay leader, sometimes it is difficult, especially when there are many tasks to handle. But to the best of my ability, I do everything I can to serve our community.’
By God’s grace, a network of chapels has emerged, led by lay leaders like Nanay Norma from the Indigenous communities they serve. ‘The Church has helped us a lot,’ Norma concludes, ‘especially in fostering unity and teaching us how to work together. Although we experience poverty, they are always there to help without getting tired.’
The USPG Prayer Diary today (Sunday 9 August 2026, International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples) invites us to pray:
Creator God, we give thanks for the Mangyan and all Indigenous peoples, for their rich cultures, wisdom, and deep relationship with the land. Thank you that you love them and know them by name.
The Collect of the Day:
Let your merciful ears, O Lord,
be open to the prayers of your humble servants;
and that they may obtain their petitions
make them to ask such things as shall please you;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Post-Communion Prayer:
God of our pilgrimage,
you have willed that the gate of mercy
should stand open for those who trust in you:
look upon us with your favour
that we who follow the path of your will
may never wander from the way of life;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Additional Collect:
Lord of heaven and earth,
as Jesus taught his disciples to be persistent in prayer,
give us patience and courage never to lose hope,
but always to bring our prayers before you;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
The Jewish Holocaust Memorial at Liberty Square, Thessaloniki … a bronze sculpture by Nandor Glid of a menorah whose flames are wrapped around human bodies (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Patrick Comerford
This year marks the 110th anniversary of the time my grandfather was in Thessaloniki and picked up a deadly strain of malaria. He was sent home from World War I in 1916, and that may have saved him from being sent to the trenches in France, and also provided a time gap in which my father was conceived and born.
None of my father’s sibling – brothers and sisters, half-brothers and half-sisters – had any children. So, without picking up malaria in Thessaloniki 100 years ago, my father would not have been born, and my grandfather would have no living descendants.
But malaria was a killer in those days. Within five years of contracting malaria in Greece, Stephen Edward Comerford had died a sad and lonely death in a hospital ward.
Thessaloniki has been a favourite city of mine in Greece for many years, and I was familiar with and fond of its street and buildings, its history and stories, its poetry and music, its synagogues, churches and monasteries, long before I realised the true and sad story of how my grandfather died. When I realised his story, I went back to Thessaloniki to retrace his steps.
The names of Holocaust victims on the pavement in Vassilisis Olgas Avenue (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
But, as I think of anniversaries in Thessaloniki, I also remember today that another anniversary, 11 July 1942, is remembered in Thessaloniki as ‘Black Saturday’ – the day when the Nazis forced 9,000 Jewish men between the ages of 18 and 45 to assemble in Liberty Square. For hours in the blazing summer heat, German soldiers beat and humiliated them before crowds of onlookers. About 2,000 were sent to forced labour; the rest were eventually ransomed by the community, which sold its ancient cemetery to raise the sum demanded.
Shortly before my grandfather arrived in Thessaloniki, Greece had taken Thessaloniki from the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars and it was incorporated into the modern Greek state in 1912. The Jewish community in the city was 70,000 strong at the time, and was the city’s largest ethnic group.
The port city closed every Saturday. Most workers – including the dockworkers – were Jewish and observed Shabbat. Street signs were in Ladino, the Judaeo-Spanish language of Sephardic Jews. Synagogues were found in almost every neighbourhood, newspapers published in four languages served the cosmopolitan population, but Ladino and Greek were the main languages and the dominant voice in the synagogues was Spanish-inflected Hebrew prayers.
In those days, Thessaloniki was known as the ‘Mother of Israel’ and the ‘Jerusalem of the Balkans.’ For over three centuries, it was the largest Sephardic Jewish city in the world and the only major European city where Jews formed the majority.
By 1613, Jews were 68 per cent of Thessaloniki's population – a percentage unmatched anywhere else in Europe, before or since. This was a living reality into the 20th century: Sabbath observance shut down commerce, rabbinical courts wielded authority, Ladino echoed through marketplaces and Jewish printing presses produced books shipped across the Mediterranean.
But, in the space of five months in 1943, the Nazis erased all that almost completely.
Jews started arriving in Thessaloniki in large numbers following the expulsions from Spain in 1492 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
The story begins in 1492, with catastrophe transformed into refuge. When Spain’s Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand issued the Alhambra Decree expelling all Jews from Spain, between 15,000 and 20,000 Sephardic Jews fled across the Mediterranean. Many settled in Thessaloniki, a bustling port city in the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II welcomed them. He realised that Spain’s loss could be his empire’s gain. The Jewish refugees brought skills in medicine, printing, textiles, metalwork, and international trade, they spoke multiple languages and they had commercial networks spanning continents.
‘The Spanish king is a fool,’ Bayezid reportedly said, ‘impoverishing his own country to enrich mine.’
The Sephardic Jews transformed Thessaloniki. They established the city’s first printing press in the late 15th century, making Thessaloniki a centre of Jewish scholarship and book production. They built synagogues – eventually 42 of them – each named after the Spanish or Portuguese city their founders had fled: Catalán Yashan (Old Catalan), Aragon, Lisboa, Evora, Castile.
They created networks that made Thessaloniki one of the Ottoman Empire’s most important trading hubs. Jewish merchants shipped wool, silk and ceramics across the Mediterranean, Jewish craftsmen became the exclusive tailors for the Ottoman Janissaries, and Jewish bankers facilitated trade between east and west.
By 1519, just 27 years after the expulsion, Jews made up 56 per cent of Thessaloniki’s population. By 1613, that figure reached 68 per cent. Thessaloniki became the only major European city where Christians and Muslims were minorities.
The former Bank of Thessaloniki founded by the Allatini family … now the Malakopi Arcade (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
For over 300 years, from the 16th to the early 20th century, Jewish life defined the rhythm of life in Thessaloniki. The city essentially shut down from Friday evening until Saturday night, honouring the Jewish Sabbath alongside the Muslim Friday prayers and Christian Sunday observance.
The community thrived during the Ottoman era. The millet system granted religious minorities autonomy to order their own affairs. Jewish courts handled civil disputes, rabbinical authorities oversaw education, marriage and religious life, and the community paid collective taxes but otherwise it was self-governing.
Wealthy Jewish entrepreneurs led Thessaloniki’s industrialisation in the mid-19th century. The Allatini brothers established the first modern flour-milling plant in 1854, followed by textile factories, brickmaking facilities, and tobacco-processing plants. By the early 20th century, Jews owned 38 of the city’s 54 largest trading houses.
The community also had a vibrant working class. Jewish stevedores controlled the docks, Jewish weavers supplied textiles throughout the Balkans, and Jewish printers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and merchants filled every sector of urban life.
Intellectually, Thessaloniki became a Jewish powerhouse. Schools flourished; the Alliance Israélite Universelle opened modern educational institutions that taught French alongside traditional Jewish subjects; a whole generation became conversant with both Jewish tradition and European modernity; and newspapers in Ladino connected the community with Sephardic Jews across the Ottoman world.
Politically, Thessaloniki’s Jews were active in Ottoman reform movements. Many supported the Young Turks revolution of 1908, which sought to modernise the empire with constitutional government.
Zionist leaders who visited the city saw it as a model. David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, and Ze’ev Jabotinsky all visited Thessaloniki in the early 20th century, seeing in its Jewish majority a preview of how a Jewish state might work.
The Jewish Memorial at the Aristotele University of Thessaloniki, on the site of the city’s ancient Jewish cemetery (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
But even as Thessaloniki’s Jewish community reached its peak, forces were gathering that would unravel its world. Four years before my grandfather’s arrival there, Greece captured Thessaloniki in 1912 during the Balkan Wars. The Jewish community – 70,000 strong at the time and the city’s largest ethnic group – faced an uncertain future.
At first, the Greek government recognised the community’s rights and traditions. But tensions simmered, Greek merchants resented Jewish commercial sway, and some people saw the Jewish presence as a remnant of Ottoman rule.
On 18 August 1917, a small kitchen fire in central Thessaloniki exploded into an inferno. For 32 hours, flames consumed over one-third of the city. The fire destroyed 9,500 buildings, and left 70,000 people homeless, 52,000 of them Jews, and 16 of the 33 synagogues were burned. Jewish schools, libraries, charitable institutions, and the grand rabbinate's archives, with the records of centuries of births, marriages and deaths, rabbinical decisions and community history, vanished in smoke.
The entire documented history of one of the world’s great Jewish communities went up in flames, and the fire devastated Jewish Thessaloniki. Over 20,000 Jews, unable to find shelter, left the city for Athens, France, the US and Palestine.
The community rebuilt itself on the outskirts of the city, but it never recovered its former glory. The balance in the population shifted dramatically in 1923 when Greece and Turkey negotiated a population exchange. About 1.5 million Greek Orthodox Christians were moved to Greece from Turkey, with roughly 100,000 settling in Thessaloniki. For the first time in four centuries, Jews had become a minority in the city they had once defined.
The tracks to Auschwitz … old railway tracks at the port where the convoys left for the death camps (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
By 1940, Thessaloniki had a Jewish population of about 56,000 in a city that had grown to about 250,000 residents. The community had survived fires, political upheaval, and demographic transformation, they kept open their synagogues, schools and cultural institutions, and they remained a vital part of the city’s fabric. But nothing prepared them for what came next.
On 9 April 1941, German forces occupied Thessaloniki. Within a week, Nazi authorities arrested Jewish community leaders, confiscated Jewish homes and hospitals, and began the systematic looting of Jewish cultural property. Tens of thousands of books, religious artifacts, and artworks were shipped to Germany.
On 11 July 1942 – a date remembered to this day as ‘Black Saturday’ – the Nazis forcibly rounded up 9,000 Jewish men aged between 18 and 45 in Plateia Eleftherias (Πλατεία Ελευθερίας, Liberty Square). For hours in the blazing summer heat, German soldiers beat and humiliated them before the crowds. About 2,000 were sent to forced labour. The rest were eventually ransomed by the community, which sold its ancient cemetery to raise the demanded sum.
The Jewish cemetery, with 20 generations and over 500 years of burials, was destroyed. The tombstones were purloined as building materials for footpaths, university stairs, and barrack latrines. Aristotle University now stands where the Jewish dead had been buried rested.
In February 1943, Adolf Eichmann sent Dieter Wisliceny and Alois Brunner to Thessaloniki. They were specialists in Jewish deportation and they implemented the Nuremberg Laws immediately, imposing yellow stars, movement restrictions, property confiscation. Within days, Jews were forced into three ghettos. The largest, the Baron Hirsch transit camp, was beside the railway station.
The first train left Thessaloniki on 15 March 1943. Between March and August 1943, 19 trains took as many as 46,000 Jews from Thessaloniki to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Each train held 1,000 to 4,000 people crammed into cattle cars. The seven-day journey across Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, Austria, and Czechoslovakia was torture itself, with no food, no water and no sanitation, bodies crushed together in suffocating heat or freezing cold.
When the trains arrived at Auschwitz, SS doctors carried out ‘selections’ on the platform. Most were sent directly to gas chambers. Of the 46,000 deported, about 1,950 or 4 per cent survived. The Jewish population that had comprised 68 per cent of Thessaloniki in 1613; 96 per cent of the city’s Jewish population was exterminated in 1943. In five months, the Nazis accomplished what four centuries of disasters – plagues, fires, wars, and economic transformations – had failed to do: they destroyed the Jerusalem of the Balkans.
The survivors who returned after the camps were liberated found a ghost community. Fewer than 2,000 Jews remained in Thessaloniki. Their synagogues were destroyed or vandalised, their homes had become the homes of others, their cemetery was razed, their archives were burned, their commercial networks were shattered.
Many survivors could not bear to stay and emigrated to Palestine, the USA or other diaspora communities. Others rebuilt what they could, establishing small institutions to preserve memory.
The Monasterioton Synagogue is the only surviving, pre-war working synagogue in Thessaloniki (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Today, about 1,000 Jews live in Thessaloniki, less than 0.2 per cent of the city’s population of over 800,000. Three synagogues remain of the original 42. The Monastir Synagogue survived only because Nazis used it as a Red Cross warehouse. The Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki, which attracts about 30,000 visitors a year 2023, documents the community’s history.
Dr Leon Saltiel is a historian specialising in the Holocaust in Greece. His publications include The Holocaust in Thessaloniki: Reactions to the Anti-Jewish Persecution, 1942-1943, which won the 2021 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research, and ‘Do Not Forget Me’: Three Jewish Mothers Write to their Sons from the Thessaloniki Ghetto.
Dr Saltiel is a member of the Central Board of Jewish Communities of Greece and of the Greek delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. He currently serves as Director of Diplomacy, Representative at the UN Geneva and UNESCO, and Coordinator on Countering Antisemitism for the World Jewish Congress.
A lecture organised by the Melbourne Holocaust Museum included an excerpt from ‘Do Not Forget Me’, directed by Grigoris Apostolopoulos, and written by Dr Leon Saltiel.
On 15 March each year, the anniversary of the first deportation, thousands gather for a silent march from the city centre to the old railway station, holding white balloons reading ‘Never Again’ and place flowers on the train tracks.
In 2008, Thessaloniki erected a Holocaust memorial by Nandor Glid near Liberty Square, where Jewish men were beaten on Black Saturday, 11 July 1942. One of Thessaloniki’s last Holocaust survivors, Heinz Kounio, died earlier this year (April 2026) at the age of 98. The Holocaust Museum of Greece (Μουσείο Ολοκαυτώματος Ελλάδος) in Thessaloniki is due to open later this year (2026). It will be the first museum dedicated specifically to telling the story of Sephardic Jews in the Holocaust.
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
The Jews of Thessaloniki: From antiquity and the Inquisition, to the Holocaust and today (Melbourne Holocaust Museum)
