The sculptures of Thessaloniki: 9, ‘Stolpersteine’ or ‘Stumbling Stones’ by Gunter Demnig, Vassilisis Olgas Avenue

‘Stolpersteine’ or ‘Stumbling Stones’ on the pavement on Vassilisis Olgas Avenue commemorate Greek Jews deported to Auschwitz (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

I have been recalling in recent weeks 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 these 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 these 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 in recent weeks include the monumental statues of Aristotle, Alexander the Great and Eleftherios Venizelos, the Jewish Memorial by Konstantinos Lentaris in the campus of the Aristotele University of Thessaloniki, the bust of Admiral Nikolaos Votsis in front of the White Tower, the Monument for the Jewish Holocaust on the edge of Eleftherias Square, and ‘The Woman of Pindos’ by Kostas Domboulas in Fanarioton Square.

Before World War II, Thessaloniki was home to a vibrant, centuries-old Sephardi, Romaniote and Ashkenazi Jewish community with over 50,000 to 60,000 people. Following the Nazi occupation in 1941, forced labour, ghettoisation, and systematic mass deportations to Auschwitz-Birkenau destroyed the vast majority of the community.

Throughout Europe, I regularly come across the Stolpersteine or ‘Stumbling Stones’ by the German artist Gunter Demnig. His project places engraved brass stones or cobblestones in front of the former homes, schools or work places of Holocaust victims who were deported and murdered by Nazi Germany. His Stolpersteine are small, cobblestone-sized brass memorials set into the pavement or footpath. His project began in Germany and has spread across Europe. So far, over 100,000 hand-engraved Stolpersteine have been laid in at least two dozen countries across Europe, making this dispersed project the world’s largest memorial. I have seen them in Berlin, Bratislava, Dublin, Prague, Venice, Vienna and in Thessaloniki.

The memorials in Thessaloniki are on the footpath in front of the 1st High School of Thessaloniki (1ο Γενικό Λύκειο Θεσσαλονίκης). They commemorate 149 Jewish children who were expelled from the school and deported to concentration camps on 8 May 1943 – of the 149 schoolchildren, only six survived. Five other Stolpersteine were placed at the harbour in Thessaloniki on 21 October 2016 to honour five Jewish workers in the port who were arrested, deported, and exterminated at Auschwitz in 1943.

The initiative has been driven by local groups, including a former school pupil, Apostolos Dereklis, and the Citizens’ Initiative for the Stolpersteine in Thessaloniki, with the support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation Thessaloniki Office.

‘Stumbling Stones for Thessaloniki’ began as initiative by two Humanity in Action senior fellows, Regina Frentzou and Evanthia Panagiotou, with a social art project to recover collective memory and individual commemoration of the victims of the Nazis in Thessaloniki. They were inspired during their experiences in Berlin in 2014, and felt there was a lack of commemoration for the victims of the Holocaust in Greek cities, particularly in Thessaloniki.

The Villa Modiano, built for Joseph Modiano and his family, is now part of the High School on Vassilisis Olgas Avenue (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Thessaloniki was once known as the ‘Jerusalem of the Balkans’. Demnig’s Stolpersteine on Vassilisis Olgas are critical visual anchors on the footpath that force people to ‘stumble with their heads and hearts’ over the fate of the city’s Jewish population, which was wiped out almost entirely in 1943.

Leoforos Vasilissis Olgas or Queen Olga Avenue is lined with once elegant fin de siècle villas, some now decaying and crumbling. It was once the most elegant and one of the richest areas of the city, and the home of many ruling families at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and each villa tells its own unique story. Some are galleries, others house cultural and historical institutions. Many retain their detailed colourful decorations, some even their impressive furniture, all influenced by the eclecticism of the 18th and 19th century.

Several villas have been preserved after painful restoration efforts, including the Villa Mordoch, the Villa Ahmet Kapanci (1890), the Villa Mehmet Kapanci (1893) and the Villa Bianca. Others are still sadly awaiting restoration after many decades, including the Villa Hirsch and the Salem Mansion at No 20. The Salem Mansion was designed in 1878 by Xenophon Paionides (1863-1933) for the wealthy Jeborga (Τζεμπόργκα) Jewish merchant family in 1878. It was bought in 1894 by Emmanuel Salem, the most important Jewish lawyer in the city and his family gave it its name to the Salem Mansion (Η Επαυλη Σαλέμ).

The first High School of Thessaloniki is housed in two of these elegant villas on Vassilisis Olgas Avenue, the Villa Hadjimishev, probably designed by Frederic Charnot and built in 1890 for the Bulgarian Theodore Hadjimishev, who was forced to abandon the villa and the city during the Balkan Wars, and the Villa Modiano, built in 1899 and now the main school building.

The Villa Modiano was built for Joseph Modiano and his family. The family was originally from Italy and settled in Thessaloniki in the early 18th century. The Modiano and Allatini families created a trading empire in the Balkans, mainly in the fields of grain, silk and leather. The house later passed to Molho family and from 1918 on the Villa Modiano was part of the Boys’ High School. After World War II, it accommodated 15 to 22 refugee families in 1946-1958.

Demnig’s project has created the world’s largest decentralised memorial, and it has expanded to over hand-engraved stones spread across dozens of countries. These cobblestone-sized brass memorials are critical touchpoints for public history, local memory, and reflection, and the project fulfils the Talmudic teaching that ‘a person is only forgotten when his or her name is forgotten.’

I have stumbled upon these brass plaques in many cities, including such as Berlin, Bratislava, Dublin, Prague, Venice and Vienna, as well as Thessaloniki.

Dublin’s first Stolpersteine or stumbling stones were installed on 1 June 2022 outside Saint Catherine’s National School on Donore Avenue – close to Dublin’s ‘Little Jerusalem’. The six stones commemorate Irish Holocaust victims who grew up or had deep roots in Dublin: Ettie Steinberg Gluck, her husband Wojteck Gluck, and their baby son Leon, who were arrested in France and murdered in Auschwitz; Isaac Shishi, born in Dublin and murdered by the Nazis in Lithuania; and Ephraim Saks and his sister Jeanne (Lena) Saks, both from Dublin, who were murdered in Auschwitz.

El Malei Rachamim (‘God full of compassion’) is a prayer for the departed that asks for comfort and everlasting care of the deceased. It is said at Jewish funeral services, but different versions exist for different moments.

This version for the Shoah (Holocaust) is found in the Reform prayer book, Mishkan T’filah:

Fully compassionate God on high:
To our six million brothers and sisters
murdered because they were Jews,
grant clear and certain rest with You
in the lofty heights of the sacred and pure
whose brightness shines like the very glow of heaven.

Source of mercy:
Forever enfold them in the embrace of Your wings;
secure their souls in eternity.
Adonai: they are Yours.
They will rest in peace. Amen.

May their memories be a blessing, זצ״ל

Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום‎

In this series:

1, Introduction (21 September 2026)

2, Aristotle by Giorgos Georgiadis, Aristotelous Square (22 September 2026)

3, Alexander the Great by Evangelos Moustakas, Alexander’s Garden (23 September 2026)

4, Eleftherios Venizelos by Giannis Pappas, Plateia Dikastirion (24 September 2026)

5, The Jewish Monument by Konstantinos Lentaris, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (25 September 2026)

6, Admiral Nikolaos Votsis by Georgios Dimitriadis, in front of the White Tower (1 October 2026)

7, The Monument of the Jewish Holocaust by Nandor Glid, Eleftherias Square (2 October 2026)

8, ‘The Woman of Pindos’ by Kostas Domboulas, Fanarioton Square (8 October 2026)

9, ‘The Stumbling Stones’ (‘Stolpersteine’) by Gunter Demnig (9 October 2026)

Next: ‘Marathon Runner of Peace’, the monument to Grigoris Lambrakis by Vasilis Doropoulos, Ermou Street (14 October 2026)

The Villa Hadjimishev, built in 1890, is now part of the High School on Vassilisis Olgas Avenue (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The sculptures of Thessaloniki: 7, the Monument of the Jewish Holocaust by Nandor Glid, Eleftherias Square

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 sculptures I looked at last week include the monumental statues of Aristotle, Alexander the Great and Eleftherios Venizelos, the Jewish Memorial by Konstantinos Lentaris in the campus of the Aristotele University of Thessaloniki, and the bust of Admiral Nikolaos Votsis in front of the White Tower.

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.

May their memories be a blessing, זצ״ל

Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום‎

In this series:

1, Introduction (21 September 2026)

2, Aristotle by Giorgos Georgiadis, Aristotelous Square (22 September 2026)

3, Alexander the Great by Evangelos Moustakas, Alexander’s Garden (23 September 2026)

4, Eleftherios Venizelos by Giannis Pappas, Plateia Dikastirion (24 September 2026)

5, The Jewish Monument by Konstantinos Lentaris, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (25 September 2026)

6, Admiral Nikolaos Votsis by Georgios Dimitriadis, in front of the White Tower (1 October 2026)

7, The Monument of the Jewish Holocaust by Nandor Glid, Eleftherias Square (2 October 2026)

Next: ‘The Woman of Pindos’ by Kostas Domboulas, Fanarioton Square (8 October 2026)

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 sculptures of Thessaloniki: 5, the Jewish Memorial by Konstantinos Lentaris, Aristotele University of Thessaloniki

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.

May their memories be a blessing, זצ״ל

Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום‎

In this series:

1, Introduction (21 September 2026)

2, Aristotle by Giorgos Georgiadis, Aristotelous Square (22 September 2026)

3, Alexander the Great by Evangelos Moustakas, Alexander’s Garden (23 September 2026)

4, Eleftherios Venizelos by Giannis Pappas, Plateia Dikastirion (24 September 2026)

5, The Jewish Monument by Konstantinos Lentaris, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (25 September 2026)

6, Admiral Nikolaos Votsis by Georgios Dimitriadis, at the White Tower (1 October 2026)

The Jewish Studies Centre at the Aristotelean University of Thessaloniki (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

A prayer for peace from Rabbi Nachman of Breslov on a day that focuses on repentance and returning

The Shabbat before Yom Kippur, Shabbat Shuvah or Shabbat Teshuvah, focuses on repentance, forgiveness and charity

Patrick Comerford

In the Jewish calendar, these are the High Holy Days or the Days of Awe. Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, began last Friday evening (11 September 2026), beginning the year 5787 in the Jewish calendar, and ended at nightfall on Sunday (13 September). Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement begins with Kol Nidre at sunset on Sunday evening (20 September) and ends at nightfall on Monday (21 September). It is the peak of the High Holidays and the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, when people fast, pray, seek forgiveness from God and one another, and seek to come closer to God.

The Shabbat before Yom Kippur is called Shabbat Shuvah (the Sabbath of Return) or Shabbat Teshuvah. This Shabbat during the Ten Days of Repentance, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, in the middle of the solemn days of judgment and soul-searching, acts like a bridge between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

These Days of Awe (ימים נוראים‎, Yamim Noraim) provide the opportunity to ask for forgiveness from others, to reflect on the previous year and to pray for a sweet year to come. The name of this Shabbat comes from the special prophetic reading (haftarah) from the Book of Hosea, beginning with the word Shuvah (‘Return, O Israel …’), focusing on repentance and turning back to God.

The themes of this Shabbat combine the peace and joy of Shabbat with the inner reflection of the High Holidays. Rabbis traditionally reflect on this day with a special sermon that focuses on repentance, charity and better deeds. Shabbat Shuva, the Shabbat of Return, is a gift of time, returning to what truly matters and taking time for meaningful self-reflection and inner peace.

A prayer or reading that has become popular in many Jewish communities in recent years is ‘May it be your will,’ a poem by the Chasidic master, Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (1772-1810). The words of the popular song, Gesher Tzar Me’od, ‘The Whole World is but a Narrow Bridge’, are also ascribed to Rabbi Nachman.

Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, a great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov and a lineal descendant of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, known popularly as the Maharal of Prague. He was born on 4 April 1772 in Międzybóż in Poland–Lithuania, now Medzhybizh in Ukraine. Rabbi Nachman revived the Hasidic movement by combining the Kabbalah with in-depth Torah scholarship, and was the founder of the Breslov Hasidic movement.

He attracted thousands of followers in his lifetime and was particularly known for his creative parables, drawing on Eastern European folktales. His philosophy revolved around closeness to God, speaking to God in normal conversation ‘as you would with a best friend’, and being happy. He died in Uman in Ukraine on 17 October 1810.

Through Martin Buber’s translations, his teaching influenced many 20th century writers, including Franz Kafka. In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye’s informal habitual talking out loud to God mirrors Rabbi Nachman’s spiritual practice of hitbodedut or personal, spontaneous prayer or heart-to-heart talking to God in one’s own words.

Rabbi Nachman’s prayers were preserved in a collection published after his death by his disciple, Rabbi Nathan, including the petition for peace. Its opening passage appears in English in Lev Chadash (לֵב חָדָשׁ‎), the siddur or prayer book of British Liberal Judaism, now the Movement for Progressive Judaism.

This version of Rabbi Nachman’s prayer was translated by the British rabbi, Rabbi Deborah Silver, now based in Los Angeles, received wider, world-wide circulation thanks to the Masorti movement and the response to the violence in Israel and Gaza that began three years ago with the attacks on 7 October 2023.

The translator Rabbi Deborah Silver is an associate rabbi at the IKAR synagogue in Los Angeles and also an adjunct professor at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles. She was born in London, studied at Gonville and Caius College, and has degrees from Cambridge and the University of Essex.

With wars being waged around the world, this poem with its themes of peace seems appropriate at this solemn time in the Jewish year.

Rabbi Nachman’s prayer asks God to ‘erase war and bloodshed from the world and in its place draw down a great and glorious peace’, and for the inhabitants of the Earth to recognise that ‘we have not come into the world for division and strife’.

The opening petition appeals for the removal of war and bloodshed, replacing them with a profound peace where nations no longer learn or engage in war. It affirms that humanity was not created for division, hatred, or rage, but to encounter the divine.

It draws on Biblical passages asking for compassion, safety, and for banishing evil and war from the earth, and concludes with a vision of justice and righteousness flowing like water, filling the earth with the knowledge of the Holy One.

May it be Your will,
Holy One, our God, our ancestors’ God,
that you erase war and bloodshed from the world
and in its place draw down
a great and glorious peace
so that nation shall not lift up sword against nation
neither shall they learn war any more.

Rather, may all the inhabitants of the earth
recognise and deeply know
this great truth:
that we have not come into this world
for strife and division
nor for hatred and rage,
nor provocation and bloodshed.

We have come here only
to encounter You,
eternally blessed One.

And so,
we ask your compassion upon us;
raise up, by us, what is written:

I shall place peace upon the earth
and you shall lie down safe and undisturbed
and I shall banish evil beasts from the earth
and the sword shall not pass through your land.
but let justice come in waves like water
and righteousness flow like a river,
for the earth shall be full
of the knowledge of the Holy One
as the waters cover the sea.

So may it be.
And we say:
Amen.

(Translation © Rabbi Deborah Silver. The quotations are: Leviticus 26: 6, Amos 5: 24 and Isaiah 11: 9)

G’mar chatimah tovah (גמר חתימה טובה‎), A good final sealing.

Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום‎

Tales of the Viennese Jews: 23, Gabriele Keenaghan, survivor of the Kindertransport

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

Tales of the Viennese Jews:

1, the chief rabbi and a French artist’s ‘pogrom’

2, a ‘positively rabbinic’ portrait of an Anglican dean

3, portraits of two imperial court financiers

4, portrait of Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis

5, Lily Renée, from Holocaust Survivor to Escape Artist

6, Sir Moses Montefiore and a decorative Torah Mantle

7, Theodor Herzl and the cycle of contradictions

8, Simon Wiesenthal and the café in Mauthausen

9, Leonard Cohen and ‘The Spice-Box of Earth’

10, Ludwig Wittgenstein and his Jewish grandparents

11, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his Jewish librettist

12, Salomon Mayer von Rothschild and the railways in Vienna

13, Gustav Mahler and the ‘thrice homeless’ Jew

14, Beethoven at 250 and his Jewish connections in Vienna

15, Martin Buber and the idea of the ‘I-Thou’ relationship

16, Three Holocaust survivors who lived in Northern Ireland.

17, Schubert’s setting of Psalm 92 for the synagogue.

18, Bert Linder and his campaign against the Swiss banks.

19, Adele Bloch-Bauer and Gustav Klimt’s ‘Lady in Gold’.

20, Max Perutz, Nobel laureate and ‘the godfather of molecular biology’.

21, Marianne Faithfull (1946-2025) and her mother Eva Hermine von Sacher-Masoch (1912-1991)

22, Eva Geiringer Schloss (1929-2026), step-sister of Anne Frank

23, Gabriele Keenaghan, survivor of the Kindertransport

Children of the Kindertransport … Frank Meisler’s bronze sculpture at Liverpool Street Station in London (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The Mitre in Cambridge, the meaning of a name, and restoring a forgotten woman’s name at the Eagle

The Mitre on Bridge Street, Cambridge … the name is an anomaly as there is no Bishop of Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Patrick Comerford

Archbishop Sarah Mullally is only the second Archbishop of Canterbury since the 14th century to hold that office without a degree from Oxford or Cambridge. The other was Archbishop George Carey, although he later received an honorary DD from Cambridge in 2006.

Most of their post-war predecessors have had strong links with Cambridge:

• Justin Welby was educated at Trinity College, where his great-uncle, Rab Butler, was the master.

• Rowan Williams studied theology at Christ’s College, Cambridge, was a tutor, chaplain and director of studies at Westcott House, dean and chaplain of Clare College and later the Master of Magdalene College and the honorary Professor of Contemporary Christian Thought at the University of Cambridge.

• Robert Runcie studied at Westcott House, returned to Westcott House as chaplain and then as vice-principal; later he was a fellow and dean of Trinity Hall.

• Donald Coggan studied at Saint John’s College.

• Michael Ramsey was born in Cambridge, studied at Magdalene College, was the Vicar of Saint Bene’t’s Church, and for a short time was the Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge.

But despite all those Cambridge connections – and despite all the bishops associated with Westcott House I mentioned in a posting on Saturday evening – Cambridge is not a diocese. The university and the city lie within the Diocese of Ely, and while Oxford has a bishop and a cathedral there is no Bishop of Cambridge and no Cambridge Cathedral.

Which all goes to show how the name of the Mitre, a public house on Bridge Street and almost facing Saint John’s College, is something of anomaly.

The Mitre stands on the site of two former inns dating from the mid-18th century (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

While I was in Cambridge over a number of years following summer courses organised by the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies and staying at Sidney Sussex College, the Mitre on Bridge Street and the Eagle on Bene’t Street where two of the places where many of us adjourned on warm summer evenings to enjoy each other’s company and to discuss and debate the day’s proceedings.

During my walking tour of Cambridge last week with a friend from Ireland who was following a short course in theology and staying at Saint John’s College, the Mitre and the Eagle were two of the pubs I pointed out.

The Mitre, a Grade II listed building at 17 to 18 Bridge Street, has a long history and stands on the site of two former inns – the Blackmoor’s Head and the Cock and Magpie. It is said the Blackmoor’s Head took its name from Robert Blackmoor, a mediaeval chantry priest in nearby Saint Clement’s Church.

A plaque outside the Mitre recalls that the earliest record of a licensee at the site was of Robert Clarke in 1752, although the date on the arch says it was founded in 1754 – another anomaly in the story of the Mitre. Later, the Cock and Magpie was run by the widowed Ann Lawrence, a successful wine merchant. She was assisted by her eight daughters, and perhaps the nine women and a constant supply of beer added to the pub’s popularity.

A plaque at the Mitre recalls the names of the previous pubs and Ann Lawrence and her eight daughters (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

The arrival of the railway in Cambridge took away much of the river trade that the inns by the Cam depended on. By 1856, the 15 pubs of the parish had been reduced to just four; by 1874, the Cock and Magpie was the only pub remaining in the immediate vicinity. William Headdy was the licensee then and he was also the proprietor of the nearby Mitre Brewery. By 1878, the pub was known as the Mitre Billiard Rooms and it was renamed the Mitre by the publican Elizabeth Mays in 1881.

So, it appears the Mitre takes its name from a brewery and not from any bishop or diocese.

The large windows at the front of the Mitre look out onto Saint John’s College and the busy bus and bicycle lanes of Bridge Street. Bridge Street runs between Magdalene Street at the junction with Thompson’s Lane to the north-west and Sidney Street at the junction with Jesus Lane to the south-east. At one time, Bridge Street continued om over the Great Bridge on the River Cam, hence the name, but that part of the street is now known as Magdalene Street after Magdalene College.

A quiet corner in Portugal Place, around the corner from the Mitre (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Further along Magdalene Street, the Pickerel Inn at 30 Magdalene Street is widely regarded as the oldest continuous licensed site in Cambridge, and dates from 1608.

Around the corner from the Mitre, my friend and I briefly looked at Portugal Place and Portugal Street, which some say were named because Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula who found a welcome in Cromwell’s England first settled in this part of Cambridge.

However, although the Cambridge Synagogue is in Thompson’s Lane, close to the Mitre and to Portugal Place and Portugal Street, it seems the name only dates from the Peninsular War and houses built for officers returning from the Portugal to or the discovery of some Portuguese coins when the houses were built in the 19th century.

The Eagle is the second-oldest pub in Cambridge and began as the Eagle and Child in 1667 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Earlier in the day, we stopped on Bene’t Street, across from Saint Bene’t’s Church, to step into the Eagle, the second-oldest pub in Cambridge, which opened in 1667 as a coaching inn.

For decades, the Eagle was the local pub for scientists at the nearby Cavendish Laboratory. One lunchtime, on 28 February 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson came into the Eagle and announced they had ‘discovered the secret of life’, having finalised their model of the structure of DNA.

A blue plaque was unveiled at the Eagle in 2003. But from 2017, Rosalind Franklin’s name was often added in graffiti and removed. The plaque was replaced in 2023 with one that mentions Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins.

The names of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins are remembered once again at the Eagle (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Remembering 11 July 1942, the tragedy of ‘Black Saturday’ and the destruction of Jewish life in Thessaloniki

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)