Daily prayer in Ordinary Time 2026: 171, Monday 26 October 2026

‘He was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath’ (Luke 13: 10) … looking from the women’s gallery at the bimah or reading platform in the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

We are coming to the end of this part of Ordinary Time in the Church Calendar. Yesterday was the Last Sunday after Trinity, and we are moving towards Kingdom-Time or the Kingdom Season.

Today is a bank holiday in the Republic of Ireland, but not here in England. The calendar of the Church of England in Common Worship today remembers Alfred the Great, King of the West Saxons, Scholar, 899; and Cedd, Abbot of Lastingham, Bishop of the East Saxons, 664. The calendar of the Greek Orthodox Church today celebrates Saint Demetrius the Myrobles, the patron saint of Thessaloniki. 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.

The Kahal Shalom Synagogue in Rhodes … the women’s gallery is behind and above the tevah (Photograph: Jewish Community of Rhodes)

Luke 13: 10-17 (NRSVA):

10 Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. 11 And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. 12 When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, ‘Woman, you are set free from your ailment.’ 13 When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. 14 But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, ‘There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.’ 15 But the Lord answered him and said, ‘You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? 16 And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?’ 17 When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.

Christ healing an infirm woman on the Sabbath, by James Tissot (1886-1896)

Today’s Reflections:

Today’s Gospel reading (Luke 13: 10-17) reminds me once again of the Kahal Shalom Synagogue, the last surviving, functioning synagogue on the Greek island of Rhodes, and an elderly woman who gave me a guided tour of that synagogue, not just once but twice during a hot summer’s week in Greece.

The interior of the synagogue follows the traditional Sephardic style of having the tevah or reading platform in the centre, facing south-east towards Jerusalem. Behind it and above is the balcony, created in 1935 as a women’s prayer area.

Before that, women sat in rooms beside the south wall of the synagogue, and could see into the main body of the synagogue, through curtained openings. Those rooms now house the Jewish Museum of Rhodes.

The woman who showed me around, Lucia Modiano Soulam, was bent over and then in her 80s. She was a woman of exceptional bravery with an extraordinary story. She was a survivor of Auschwitz and she spoke Greek, Ladino, Italian, a little French and Turkish and very little English.

Because there are only seven Jewish families left on Rhodes, the synagogue depends on tourists to make up a minyan and to lead public prayers.

I attended a sabbath service in the synagogue as her guest, and she sat with me and my sons who were then small children. There were two women among a congregation in which the minyan was made up thanks to Israeli and American tourists.

I think of her as being captive to Satan in Auschwitz for many years because of the sins of so many men. Now she was old and bent over, but taking her place in a synagogue where once she was seen only in the balcony above and behind the tevah, or behind the screens and curtains in the women’s rooms. In her suffering, Lucia had become, truly, a Daughter of Abraham.

Lucia was never invisible. She insisted on staying in Rhodes and during her years in the synagogue, she shared stories with visitors who were charmed by her kindness and honesty and the fact that she was always smiling and joyful despite all the hardships she had endured. She died on 2 April 2010 at the age of 87 (May her Memory by a Blessing, זכרונה לברכה‎).

The woman in this morning’s story is unnamed … but then, so too are the town in which the synagogue is located, the leader of the synagogue and the protagonists too. Apart from Jesus, the only other human name used is that of Abraham.

Not even the ox and the donkey in verse 15 are named. I am only half-jesting, because the ox and ass may also remind us of the ox and ass at the manger at the first Christmas – even though they do not appear in either Gospel account of the Nativity. Or they may remind us of the colt who is untied so Christ can ride into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday (see Luke 19: 30, 33).

This woman is unique, for no other woman in the Bible is referred to as a daughter of Abraham. Indeed, Genesis records no named daughter of Abraham, and the rabbis argue whether Abraham had any daughters.

There are two men in Saint Luke’s Gospel that she might be compared with:

1, The unnamed rich man in the story of ‘Dives’ and Lazarus (Luke 16: 19-31). This man addresses Abraham as ‘father’ or ‘Father Abraham,’ and he in turn is addressed by Abraham as ‘Child.’ But in this morning’s Gospel story, the child of Abraham is the outsider who has been left waiting on the margins for too long and is brought in. So the woman is more like Lazarus than ‘Dives.’

2, The description of the woman as daughter of Abraham is matched later in this Gospel when Christ insists that Zacchaeus is ‘a son of Abraham’ (Luke 19: 9; 2 November 2025), a point that is also made before of a crowd, a crowd that rejects Zacchaeus the tax collector as a sinner. Think of how this woman’s physical position of being bent over is symbolic in the same way that Zacchaeus is short in stature.

In this morning’s story, Christ shows what it means to be a citizen of God’s kingdom – through his actions. He heals this woman and calls her a ‘daughter of Abraham’, which makes her, remarkably, a full member of society. Christ is saying the Kingdom is open equally to women and to the sick and to the disabled and to those on the margins.

This woman does not ask to be healed, and no one asks for healing on her behalf. Christ notices her himself (verse 12), and this means he has to turn around when she enters the synagogue while he is teaching. She is behind him, either above in the balcony or hidden behind a curtain. She is invisible to Christ until he turns around.

Christ turns around, calls her down or calls her over, tells her she is free, and gives her a place in the centre of the community where she joins the men in praising God.

This story continues the story in Luke 4, where Christ reads from and teaches from the scroll in the synagogue. He is now putting into action in the synagogue what he has already taught in the synagogue.

Christ sets her free, he unties the woman. But what was she tied to? To her disability and her infirmity? To Satan? To her community’s refusal to accept her? To one interpretation of what could or could not be done on the sabbath?

Christ says to the woman, ‘… you have been set free’ (ἀπολέλυσαι, apolélusai) ‘from your weakness’ (verse 12). It is translated here with the present tense, ‘you are set free.’ This word (απολουω, apoluo) is not usually associated with healing. Its general meaning is ‘to loose,’ to unbind, to release, to send away, even to divorce (see Matthew 5: 32; 19: 3, 7, 8, 9).

It can refer to the bandages used to tie a woman to her husband. It is closely related to a word used twice by Christ in this story (λύω, luo) – to ‘untie’ an ox or donkey (verse 15) and to ‘set free’ from bondage (verse 16).

Is this a story about divorce after 18 years of an abusive marriage?

Is this is a story about controversy and division?

Is this a story about healing, wholeness and restoration?

Or – given the two synagogue settings I have referred to this morning – is this a story about the practical relationship between what we believe and what we do – getting the balance right between believing and doing, between being and doing?

There is one other possibility in this story, a perspective that is not offered by commentators, perhaps because many are not familiar with customs within Judaism, yet one that I believe may be possible and perhaps even profound.

Jewish law or halakhah considers converts to Judaism as spiritually adopted into the lineage of Abraham and Sarah, the first Jewish patriarch and matriarch. Converts are often called ‘ben Avraham Avinu’ (son of Abraham, our father) or ‘bat Sarah Imenu’ (daughter of Sarah, our mother) during liturgical ceremonies such as being called up to Torah readings in the synagogue.

This custom serves to emphasise their connection to these foundational figures and signifies that converts are spiritually adopted into the Jewish lineage, becoming part of the covenant established with Abraham and Sarah. This practice is a way to acknowledge their entry into the Jewish people and their spiritual connection to the foundational figures of Judaism.

A number of major halakhic authorities ruled that for a female convert, one should write in the ketubah and in the get: bat Avraham Avinu, ‘daughter of Abraham our forefather’. There was an insistence among the halakhic authorities to list names exactly in the ketubah, so that in the event of divorce, they would also be as exact as possible in the gett.

On the other hand, there are those who write plonit hagiyoret, ‘so-and-so the female convert’, in the ketubah of a female convert, so that if she should become widowed, she should not marry a kohen, since a convert may not marry a kohen.

The custom of referring to a woman who is a convert to Judaism as ‘bat Sarah’ is not as ancient as the custom of referring to her as ‘bat Avraham’. In any case, Jewish law also forbids Jews to mistreat a proselyte, including reminding them that they were once not a Jew.

A ger tzedek (גֵּר צֶדֶק) or righteous convert to Judaism who has become fully Jewish, is viewed in Judaism as an extremely noble soul, who decided to connect his or her fate to the Jewish people, to receive the hard and serious responsibility to be part of the ‘Priestly Nation’.

Rabi Shimon ben Lakish declared: ‘A proselyte is more precious in the eyes of the Holy One … than those who stood at the foot of Sinai. Why is this so? If those who stood at the foot of Mount Sinai had not experience the thunder, the flames, the lightning, the quaking of the mountain, and the sound of the shofarot, they would not have accepted the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven upon themselves, whereas a proselyte, who witnessed none of these things, makes himself acceptable to the Holy One … and receives upon himself the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven. Is there anyone more precious than this?’ (Midrash Tanhuma, Parashat Lech Lecha, 6)

There is a possibility here that this woman, or her long deceased husband, were converts to Judaism, but were constantly reminded of this, and her suffering for 18 years that left her bent over and unable to stand up straight was merely an excuse for denying her the place that was rightfully hers in the community. In calling her ‘daughter of Abraham’, Jesus restores her to her rightful place in the community, calls on her, as it were, to stand upright in the midst of the community that for too long has denied her that place.

One of the areas I used to teach in is Patristics. In other words, I enjoy reading old sermons and letters from the East Mediterranean, especially when they are written in Greek. These include a sermon preached in Caesarea about 16½ centuries ago by the great Cappadocian Father, Gregory of Nazianzus, ‘On Love for the Poor’ (Oration 14, ‘On Love for the Poor’).

It was the late 360s, and the city was in the midst of an outbreak of leprosy. Gregory describes a ‘terrible,’ ‘pitiable’ and ‘unbelievable’ sight of people, dead and alive, with mutilated bodies that made them ‘scarcely recognisable.’

In claiming, in demanding recognition, they called out the names of their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, the names of their families, friends and homes. Gregory noted: ‘They do this because they cannot be recognised by their former shape; they are truncated human beings, deprived of possessions, family, friends and their very bodies.’

But their calls fell on deaf ears. Fathers drove their children away, and those who were physically unrecognisable became morally unrecognisable too. They became non-people, with no human rights, with no recognition of their shared humanity.

Gregory responds by invoking the doctrine of the imago Dei. The lepers can no longer care for themselves or look after themselves. They have lost their human form, yet he declares they have not lost their divine likeness. He tells the people of Caesarea in his sermon:

‘This is how they are suffering … our brothers and sisters before God (even if you prefer not to think so) who share the same nature with us, who have been put together from the same clay from which we first came, who are strung together with nerves and bones in the same way we are, who have put on flesh and skin like all of us … Or rather, if I must speak of greater things, they have been made in the image of God in the same way you and I have.’ (Brian E Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus, Oxford: Routledge, 2006, p 83.)

But Gregory does not stop there. He argues that because these people ‘have been made in the image of God’ the community is obliged to do something. He tells the people listening to his sermon that they must offer relief, give them money, give them gifts, including food, clothing and medicine, dress their wounds, and speak up for them.

From start to finish, his sermon is a call to action. The Church is to include those who have been excluded by society. When we recognise that someone is made in the image of God, then we must include them. In other words, recognition of this truth involves a moral obligation towards those one the margins.

Who are on the margins for me today, those I would rather not see?

• Muslims?
• Women in hijabs?
• The refugees coming ashore in lifeboats or staying in cheap hotels. surrounded by baying, racist mobs?
• A child in a burial shroud in Gaza?
• Traumatised hostages still suffering after their released?
• The migrants in the Mediterranean?
• The farm labourers deported by ICE?
• The children in Calais?
• The homeless?
• The long-term unemployed?
• Families in direct provision or houses in multiple occupation (HMO)?
• The outsider who has been denied her/his rightful place as an insider?
• Those who are bound to dehumanising relationships because of bad or broken marriages?
• Those whose humanity, being in the image of God, is denied by my Church because of their sexuality?
• Those in debt?
• Those from the north side?
• Those from the south side?
• Those with whom I have profound and deep differences, religiously, politically and socially?

Once I recognise one of these as a child of God, once I recognise one of these as a brother or sister, once I realise that they too are made in the image and likeness of God, then there is no longer us and them. Then my compassion has to stop being sentimental and has to turn to action. Then it stops being a choice and starts being an obligation. For in Christ there is no ‘us’ and ‘them.’

Let me conclude this morning by asking some questions:

When should we do things in the church we believe are right, and only deal with the repercussions afterwards?

When do we need to discuss and come to an agreement before taking action?

What holds people in bondage?

In what ways does legalism bind them?

How are we held in bondage to past successes, defending our habits by saying: ‘This is the way we’ve always done it’?

Does the way we behave in our churches on Sundays free people or keep them tied up?

An icon of the Nativity of Christ … the ox and the ass are inseparably linked with the manger though they are not mentioned in the Gospel accounts of the Nativity

Today’s Prayers (Monday 26 October 2026):

The theme this week (25 to 31 October) in Pray with the World Church, the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), is ‘Update from Myanmar’ (pp 50-51). This theme was introduced yesterday with a programme update from the Revd Davidson Solanki, Senior Regional Manager for Asia and the Middle East, USPG.

The USPG Prayer Diary today (Monday 26 October 2026) invites us to pray:

Heavenly Father, continue to bless the people of Myanmar affected by the earthquake with protection, resilience, and renewed strength. May the Church be a sign of comfort and practical support.

The Collect of the Day:

God, our maker and redeemer,
we pray you of your great mercy
and by the power of your holy cross
to guide us by your will and to shield us from our foes:
that, after the example of your servant Alfred,
we may inwardly love you above all things;
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 our redeemer,
who inspired Alfred to witness to your love
and to work for the coming of your kingdom:
may we, who in this sacrament share the bread of heaven,
be fired by your Spirit to proclaim the gospel in our daily living
and never to rest content until your kingdom come,
on earth as it is in heaven;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Yesterday’s Reflections

Continued Tomorrow

Lucia Modiano Soulam, who welcomed me to the synagogue in Rhodes, died on 2 April 2010 at the age of 87 (Photograph courtesy Jewish Community of Rhodes)

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org

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)

Martha Nussbaum: a philosopher’s odyssey from an Episcopalian childhood to Reform Judaism’s pursuit of political justice

Looking out from Preveli Monastery in Crete towards the island of Gavdos, said to be the Ogygia of Calypso where Odysseus stayed for seven years (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

While Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey was the topic of conversation, I was writing in recent weeks how the Revd Dr Giles Fraser, in ‘Thought for the Day’ on Radio 4 last month (24 July 2026), talked about an essay on why Odysseus is right to refuse the temptation to eternal life while he stranded with the nymph Calypso on the island of Ogygia.

He referred to the American philosopher Professor Martha Nussbaum of the University of Chicago, who he interviewed for The Guardian many years ago (29 June 2012). In his Thought for the Day’, he referred to how she argues that there are some things that the immortal gods are not able to do that mortal human beings are: not least amongst them is to show courage. If I cannot risk everything because I cannot die, he asked, then how could I possibly be courageous?

Martha Nussbaum, who is Jewish, suggests that there is something about this refusal of invulnerability that explains one of the key features of Christian theology: of God becoming human, of God who is prepared to suffer and die in the name of love. ‘What is attractive about both Odysseus and Jesus is that they are prepared to have skin in the game, which is pretty much the very definition of incarnation’, Giles Fraser says.

Since then, I have found myself reading some of the work of Martha Nussbaum, who is one of the world’s foremost public philosophers. She is Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, where she is part of both the law school and the philosophy department and and an associate member of the Divinity School faculty. She has also taught at Harvard and Brown.

In her work, Martha Nussbaum has engaged with ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy, existentialism, feminism, and ethics, such as animal rights. She has written more than two dozen books, including The Fragility of Goodness (1986), she has received a number of prestigious international prizes, and some years ago she was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Martha Nussbaum was born Martha Craven in New York on 6 May 1947, the daughter of George Craven, a Philadelphia lawyer, and Betty Warren, an interior designer, and grew up in an affluent Episcopalian home in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Her mother was an alcoholic whose forbears arrived on the Mayflower; her father was a successful southern-born lawyer from Georgia and she has described him as ‘bigoted against African Americans and Jews.’

She has spoken of her upbringing as ‘East Coast WASP elite … very sterile, very preoccupied with money and status’. She later explained her impatience with ‘mandarin philosophers’ and her dedication to public service as a repudiation of her own upbringing: ‘I don’t like anything that sets itself up as an in-group or an elite, whether it is the Bloomsbury group or Derrida’.

She studied theatre and classics at New York University (BA 1969) and philosophy at Harvard (MA 1972, PhD 1975), and went on to teach philosophy and classics at Harvard, Brown University, and the University of Chicago Law School.

Her book The Fragility of Goodness, Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (1986) made her a well-known figure throughout the humanities. In that book, she confronts the ethical dilemma that individuals strongly committed to justice are nevertheless vulnerable to external factors that may deeply compromise or even negate their human flourishing, and she defends the practical ethics of Aristotle over the metaphysical supernaturalism of Plato.

She rejects the Platonic notion that human goodness can fully protect against peril, siding with the tragic playwrights and Aristotle in treating the acknowledgment of vulnerability as a key to realising the human good. Her interpretation of Plato’s Symposium in particular drew considerable attention.

Further books, including The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Frontiers of Justice (2006), established her as a theorist of global justice. She has also written about the unequal freedoms and opportunities of women, and has developed a distinctive type of feminism, drawing inspiration from the liberal tradition but emphasising that liberalism, at its best, entails radical rethinking of gender relations and relations within the family.

In her philosophical work, she has also written widely about emotions and about grief, compassion, and love, and about disgust and shame. Following a court trial in Colorado in which she gave evidence, Nussbaum wrote a lengthy article on ‘Platonic Love and Colorado Law’, drawing on Plato’s Symposium and his interactions with Socrates as evidence for her argument.

In Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (1997), she appeals to classical Greek texts as a basis for the defence and reform of the liberal education. She notes how Greek cynic philosopher Diogenes aspired to transcend ‘local origins and group memberships’ in favour of becoming ‘a citizen of the world’.

In Sex and Social Justice (1999), she argues that sex and sexuality are morally irrelevant distinctions that have been artificially enforced as sources of social hierarchy, and that feminism and social justice have common concerns. She shows how sex is used to deny some people, including women and gay men, social justice.

In Hiding from Humanity (2004), Nussbaum examines the arguments for including two emotions – shame and disgust – as legitimate bases for legal judgments, and notes how projective disgust has wrongly justified group subordination, mainly of women, Jews, and homosexuals. She dismisses disgust as a reliable basis of judgment.

In From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (2010), Nussbaum analyses the role that disgust plays in law and public debate in the US, including the constitutional legal issues facing gay and lesbian people. She argues that the fundamental motivation of those advocating legal restrictions against gay and lesbian people is a ‘politics of disgust’.

She explicitly opposes the concept of a disgust-based morality as an appropriate guide for legislating. Nussbaum notes that popular disgust has been used throughout history as a justification for persecution, and recalls how at various times, racism, antisemitism and sexism, have all been driven by popular revulsion.

In Creating Capabilities (2011), she outlines a unique theory on the Capability approach or the Human development approach. She criticises existing economic indicators, such as GDP, for failing to fully account for quality of life and assurance of basic needs, instead rewarding countries with large growth distributed highly unequally across the population, and she argues the Capability approach should be prioritised by development economics policymakers.

In The New Religious Intolerance, Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age (2012), she writes a vigorous defence of the religious freedom of minorities in the face of post-9/11 Islamophobia. And, as Giles Fraser said in The Guardian at the time, by minorities she mostly means Muslims.

Her book The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal (2019), engages critically with important examples of the cosmopolitan ideal from ancient Greece and Rome to the present. The cosmopolitan political tradition in Western thought begins with the Greek Cynic Diogenes, who, when asked where he came from, responded that he was a citizen of the world. Rather than declaring his lineage, city, social class, or gender, he defined himself as a human being, implicitly asserting the equal worth of all human beings. Nussbaum pursues this ‘noble but flawed‘ vision of world citizenship as it finds expression in figures of Greco-Roman antiquity, Hugo Grotius in the 17th century, Adam Smith during the 18th century, and various contemporary thinkers.

Earlier that year, the Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in 2019, claimed the American middle class had been betrayed by an out-of-touch ‘cosmopolitan elite’ that catered to the needs of multinational companies while forgetting ‘the heartland’. Given Brexit, Donald Trump’s election, and a global turn to nationalism more generally, Hawley’s comments were anything but exceptional. What made them unique was that he directed his ire at particular academics for promulgating the beliefs of what he called the ‘cosmopolitan consensus’. Perhaps the best-known of these was Martha Nussbaum, wh o was accused by Hawley of teaching her students that ‘world citizenship’ trumps being the citizen of a nation-state.

Her latest book is The Republic of Love: Opera and Political Freedom, published earlier this year by Oxford University Press.

Nussbaum has criticised Noam Chomsky as one of the left-wing intellectuals who hold the belief that ‘one should not criticise one’s friends, that solidarity is more important than ethical correctness’.

She is known for her contributions in developing the capabilities approach to well-being, in which she asks, ‘What is each person able to do and to be?’ She asserts that all humans – and non-human animals – have a basic right to dignity. To provide human dignity, she insists governments must provide ‘at least a threshold level’ of a number of capabilities: life; bodily health; bodily integrity; senses, imagination, and thought, emotions; practical reason; affiliation; other species; play; and control over one's environment, including political and material environments.

‘Knowledge is no guarantee of good behaviour, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behaviour’ … Martha C Nussbaum (Photograph: University of Chicago Divinity School

From 1969 to 1987, Martha Nussbaum was married to Professor Alan Nussbaum of Yale and Cornell, a linguist and classical philologist known for his work on the language of the Homeric epics. During their marriage, she converted to Judaism and her commitment to Judaism has continued. She became a bat mitzvah at Temple KAM Isaiah Israel in Chicago in 2008, delivering a D’var Torah on the connection between genuine, non-narcissistic consolation and the pursuit of global justice.

For Nussbaum, coming to Judaism was both comfort and reprieve. She has described ‘the combination of joy and relief I found in entering a community in which outrage at injustice was normal.’

She soon came to appreciate the Jewish tradition of spirited debate. ‘In great contrast to my Christian education, focused on catechism and professions of faith,’ she wrote, ‘I discovered that in a Jewish conversion process it was possible to dispute about everything.’

Whether treating literary, legal, or political issues, she has consistently argued that any comprehensive ideology that claims to understand the good life fails unless it is accompanied by a love for that which is imperfect and vulnerable. ‘Philosophy does not compel, or threaten, or mock,’ she has said. ‘It doesn’t make bare assertions, but, instead, sets up a structure of thought in which a conclusion follows from premises the listener is free to dispute. In that way it invites dialogue and respects the listener.’

In her essay ‘Judaism and the Love of Reason,’ she describes her love for the ideas of the leaders of 19th century Reform Judaism, a movement she praises for its rationalism, its moral mission and commitment to justice, and for ‘returning the religion to its original Biblical core.’

In Women and Human Development (2000), she criticises secular feminists for ascribing patriarchy to religious traditions. In ‘Judaism and the Love of Reason’, she cites feminism and cosmopolitanism as ‘issues that have been at the heart of the Reform movement since its inception and to which Reform Judaism gives … more satisfactory answers than do other varieties of Judaism.’

In an interview with Benjamin Balint in Sources in Spring 2022, Martha Nussbaum said she does not ‘even really think that Biblical Judaism is inherently patriarchal. I once wrote a paper on the Creation stories in Genesis and learned a lot about how great interpreters have read Genesis 1 as holding that the first human was a hermaphrodite. And there are many other ways in which the apparently misogynistic aspects of the text have been differently interpreted by great textual scholars.’

Asked why religious ritual is important for people who seek to live a moral life, she cited Immanuel Kant, who ‘said that people have a duty to join a religious group of the right sort (the rational sort, and Reform Judaism is pretty much the rational religion he had in mind), because we are all weak and inclined to deviate from the moral law, but in a group with others our resolve is strengthened.’

In her speech when she received an honorary degree from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, she painted a portrait of the Judaism that inspires her, including the commitment to correct injustices in the community and to welcome all strangers.

The Israeli novelist David Grossman, who received an honorary degree the same day, said to her that that is the sort of Judaism Israel needs. In his speech, he talked about the capacity of the literary imagination to see the infinite in each person, and to cross the boundaries that divide us in life. He then asked whether that capacity is being lost in the Israel of today.

She told Benjamin Balint, ‘So that is what Reform strengthens, I believe: that imaginative capacity to see the infinite in each person and to welcome the stranger.’ And, she added, ‘the Judaism I belong to requires the pursuit of political justice.’

Nicolás Maduro and the claims of the kidnapped president of Venezuela to Sephardic ancestry

Nicolás Maduro Moro claimed Sephardic Jewish ancestry in an interview 13 years ago

Patrick Comerford

The kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro Moro claimed Sephardic Jewish ancestry 13 years ago, although he has never identified himself as Jewish in terms of religion, nor has he ever practised Judaism. In an interview in 2013, Maduro spoke of how his grandparents were descended from Sephardic families but had converted from Judaism to Catholicism in Venezuela.

The Antilles and the Caribbean have long had an important Jewish presence, and a large proportion of the Jewish families in the region are Sephardic in origin, as I learned during a course in Sephardic genealogy and history that I took during the Covid-19 lockdown. The series of weekly Zoom seminars or webinars on Sephardic history was organised by the Bevis Marks Synagogue and the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Community in London in May and June 2020.

Researchers recently claimed Christopher Columbus may have been a Sephardic Jew from Spain rather than being from Genoa. They announced their conclusions in October 2024 after 20 years of DNA and genetic tests on part of his remains that are said to be held in a tomb in the Cathedral in Seville.

Maduro’s claims to Jewish ancestry are not unique for a Latin American president: President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo of Mexico, whose 83% approval ratings make her one of the most popular leaders in the world today, is the first Jewish president in a country with one of the largest Catholic populations. Although she is not a religiously observant Jew, Dr Sheinbaum identifies as culturally Jewish and has spoken proudly about her heritage. Her father Carlos Sheinbaum was of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, from a family who emigrated from Lithuania in 1928; her mother Annie Pardo is from a Sephardi Jewish family who fled to Mexico from the persecution of Jews in Bulgaria during World War II.

The first Jewish immigrants to Venezuela were found in the Dutch colonies in South America in the 17th century. Jews escaping the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions found refuge and freedom of worship in places such as Recife in Dutch Brazil, although, even after Simon Bolivar’s wars of liberation, Jews faced anti-Jewish discrimination.

Maduro is a classic Sephardic name and is a common name on the island of Curaçao in the Dutch Antilles, which has an extensive Jewish heritage. Both of Nicolás Maduro’s parents – Nicolás Maduro García (d. 1989), and Teresa de Jesús Moros (d. 1994) – were descended from Sephardic families whose ancestors were among Iberian Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the late 15th century and who moved to the Netherlands.

The Maduro family moved from Amsterdam to the Caribbean in the 18th century, first to Curaçao and then to Aruba in the Dutch Antilles, where they were among the islands’ earliest settlers. Over generations, members of the family migrated from Aruba to Colombia and later to Venezuela, through the coasts of Falcón state and then on to Lara and Zulia states, where some family members converted to Catholicism.

Salomon Elias Levy Maduro (Papa Monchi) bought the Maduro plantation in Curaçao in 1853

The first family member to move to Aruba, Moses Solomon Levy Maduro, arrived in 1754 while working for the Dutch West India Company. Salomón de Moisés Levy Maduro and his wife Sara, daughter of Jacob de Samuel Levy Maduro, were living in Aruba in 1764.

The Mongui Maduro Museum is housed in the former Rooi Catootje plantation house in the Dutch Antilles island of Curaçao. The house dates from 1735, and the museum tells the story of four generations of the Levy Maduro family and its Sephardic Jewish ancestry, with displays that include the family tree of Salomon Abraham (Mongui) Levy Maduro.

Their stories and influence on the social and economic history of Curaçao are told in the museum, and the displays include antiques and heirlooms. Mongui Maduro’s grandfather Salomon Elias Levy Maduro (Papa Monchi) was a businessman who bought Rooi Catootje in 1853 and built a legacy that continues today. Mongui Maduro was raised by his uncle Manchi and spent a lifetime collecting Judaica and Antillana books and newspaper clippings. His collection evolved into a fully functioning reference library through the efforts of his daughter Ena in 2010.

The history of the Jews in Venezuela dates from the mid-17th century, when groups of marranos or Spanish and Portuguese descendants of baptised Jews who may have secretly continued to adhere to Judaism, lived in Tucacas, Caracas and Maracaibo. The Jewish Cemetery in Santa Ana de Coro is the oldest Jewish cemetery in continuous use in the Americas.

The vast majority of Venezuela’s Jews left during the past two decades, under Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez. They left for Israel and the US, as well as Panama, Colombia, Costa Rica and Guatemala. Maduro may have been anxious to assert his claims to Sephardic ancestry in an interview in 2013 as a response to accusations that his regime tolerated or even encouraged antisemitism in Venezuela.

After Chávez was elected in 1998, he began to engineer a campaign against Venezuela’s Jews, and his anti-Zionism often descended into antisemitism. During a demonstration outside the main Sephardi synagogue in Caracas, the wall was scrawled with the words ‘Jews, killers – leave’. Police raided the Club Hebraica in Los Chorros, an upmarket neighbourhood in East Caracas, in November 2004, after the murder of a public prosecutor, Danilo Anderson, and accused the club of storing Mossad weapons alleged to have been used in the killing. Chávez later said ‘the descendants of those who killed Christ had taken possession of all the wealth in the world.’

Maduro was Foreign Minister and then Vice-President under Chávez. At times, Maduro publicised his contacts with Jewish figures in Venezuela. When he announced in 2013 that his grandparents were Sephardim and had converted to Catholicism, he may have been anxious to counter accusations of antisemitism made against his regime. He met Jewish leaders in Caracas, including Rabbi Isaac Cohen of the Asociación Israelita de Venezuela, in 2017 framing the meeting as a dialogue on coexistence. In Maduro met Rabbi Shlomo Moshe Amar, the Sephardic chief rabbi, who was visiting Venezuela in 2018, and during that visit awarded a medal to Rabbi Isaac Cohen.

On the other hand, Maduro’s recent election rival, Henrique Capriles Radonski, who was raised a Catholic, also has Sephardi Jewish and Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry: his maternal grandparents, Andrés Radonski and Lili Bochenek, survived the Holocaust and emigrated from Poland with his mother to Venezuela in 1947. His great-grandparents were murdered in Treblinka during the Holocaust; his maternal grandmother, Lili Bochenek, lived for 20 months in the Warsaw Ghetto; and his paternal grandfather, Armando Capriles-Myerston, was a Sephardi Jew.

The attacks on Jews lessened during Maduro’s presidency, but by then many Jews had left Venezuela. After his kidnapping, the now acting President, Delcy Rodríguez, alleged his capture of Maduro and the US attack were a ‘Zionist’ attack. Her claims were seen as a thinly-veiled attempt to scapegoat to the ever-shrinking Jewish community in Venezuela. Venezuela had a Jewish community of about 22,000 people when Chávez took office in 1999. Today there are fewer than 6,000 Jews in the country.

• These links offer closer looks at the family tree of the Maduro family in Curaçao: a genealogical profile of Susana Maduro, grandmother of Nicolás Maduro on Geneanet and her ancestral connections HERE; and the story of Sephardic Jews in Aruba, with details of the arrival of the Maduro family in Aruba HERE.

Four generations of the Levy Maduro family were owners of Landhuis Rooi Catootje from 1853 to 1974

Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום‎

A reminder that even in darkness resilience and hope can shine and bring light into the darkest places

The Chanukiah from the Jewish Museum at the Museum of the Home in London yesterday (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Patrick Comerford

We had intended to go to the Chanukah lighting ceremony in Bletchley Park last Sunday. But circumstances changed last weekend, events caught up with us, and we never got there along with a friend who was visiting us. Then, as Sunday afternoon unfolded, any intentions, any plans, or any notions of being in Bletchley were forgotten as news broke of the attack at Bondi Beach in Sydney, which has become a tragedy for Jewish communities around the world.

Chanukah continues until next Sunday evening. But this year it has become an especially personally poignant and deeply painful Chanukah for many people in England, with the Bondi Beach attack coming so soon after the attack on the Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester. It is a stark reminder too that antisemitism is a global threat and of how widespread and dangerous hatred has become.

It was an act of violence that highlights the urgent need for all to unite against hatred and to continue collectively all efforts to pursue safety, tolerance, and understanding. But Chanukah symbolises hope, perseverance and endurance, a reminder that even in darkness, resilience and hope can shine the brightest, and for many it is a challenge to bring light into even the darkest times and places.

Having missed the lighting of the Chanukiah in Bletchley Park last Sunday evening, we found ourselves unexpectedly with an opportunity to join a celebration of Chanukah in London yesterday in a collaboration between the Jewish Museum and the Museum of the Home.

After lighting five of the the candles and reciting the blessings we sang the first verse of Ma’oz Tzur (מָעוֹז צוּר‎) a liturgical poem or piyyut in Hebrew sung at Hanukkah after lighting the festival lights:

My Refuge, my Rock of Salvation!
’Tis pleasant to sing your praises.
Let our house of prayer be restored.
And there we will offer you our thanks.
When you will have slaughtered the barking foe.
Then we will celebrate with song and psalm
the altar’s dedication.

It is a hymn that tells Jewish history in a poetic form and celebrates deliverance from four ancient enemies, Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, Haman and Antiochus. It is named for its Hebrew incipit, which means ‘Strong Rock (of my Salvation)’, a name or epithet for God. It may have been written in the 13th century, although recent research suggests the 12th century. It was sung only at home originally, but has been sung in the synagogue since at least the 19th century.

The Museum of the Home in Hoxton is in 18th-century former almshouses founded in 1714 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Three of us were visiting the Museum of the Home, formerly the Geffrye Museum, which is housed in the 18th-century Grade I-listed former almshouses on Kingsland Road in Hoxton. The almshouses was first built in 1714 with a bequest ln a legacy from Sir Robert Geffrye (1613-1704).

A special all-day event in the Museum of the Home yesterday (18 December 2025) was ‘Object Handling with the Jewish Museum’ from 11 am to 4 pm. This was a free, drop-in day, with an invitation to get up close and personal with handling objects from the Jewish Museum’s collection at the recreation in the Museum of the Home of the 1913 tenement flat, where the Delinsky family will be preparing for a Hanukkah feast.

The day included doughnuts from Rinkoff’s Bakery for sale in their shop and dreidels to play outside their 1913 room, and ended with lighting a special Chanukiah in the atrium at 4 pm.

Sir Robert Geffrye had been a merchant, slave trader, Lord Mayor of London and Master of the Ironmongers’ Company. The almshouses were built to house the widows of ironmongers, and had 14 four-room houses, housing up to 56 pensioners, with a large garden. The Ironmongers' Company decided by 1911 the area had become too dangerous for pensioners and moved to new premises.

The Geffrye Almshouse and its gardens were bought by the London County Council in 1911. The gardens represented 14% of the open space in Shoreditch, a densely populated area, and the Geffrye Museum opened in 1914. The museum was run in the late 20th century by the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA), before becoming a charitable trust in 1991.

The museum closed in 2018 for 2½ years for an £18 million development project and reopened as the Museum of the Home in 2021. The museum explores home and home life from 1600 to the present day with galleries that ask questions about ‘home’, present diverse lived experiences, and examine the psychological and emotional relationships people have with the idea of ‘home’ alongside a series of period room displays.

The museum hosts exhibitions that exploring the meaning of home to diverse communities. The main museum building is Grade I listed, and several buildings connected with the museum are listed Grade II* and Grade II.

The Tenement Flat recreates a Friday night in 1913 when the Delinsky family prepares to welcome in Shabbos (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

The Tenement Flat in 1913 is a permanent exhibition in the museum that recreates a Friday night when the Delinsky family prepares to welcome in Shabbos. Their flat is in the Rothschild Buildings, among dozens of tenement blocks built in the late 1800s in an effort to clear inner London of notorious slums and raise the standard of living for working-class Londoners.

By the 1980s, these blocks had come symbols of east London’s poverty, and the Rothschild Buildings were among many that were demolished.

In the museum exhibition, the Delinsky family welcomes in Shabbos on Friday nights. Ray’s famous lokshen soup is simmering on the stove as she prepares the chicken to be roasted in the oven. Ray’s daughter Bessie has spent most of the day tirelessly cleaning the flat and has just sent her brother Nathan to Brick Lane for some last-minute needs. Their father Israel has finished a long week of work and has gone to the local synagogue to pray, before returning home to begin dinner with a blessing.

The room was curated with the help of members of Jewish community groups and was funded by the Shoresh Trust. The objects in the room include religious silverware from ca 1900-1910, and The Economical Jewish Cook by May Henry and Edith B Cohen (1897).

Shabbat Mikets or the Shabbat in Chanukah begins this evening (19 December 2025) at 3:38 pm and the time for lighting the Chanukah candles at home is some time between 3:03 pm and 3:38 pm.

Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום‎

Chag Sameach Chanukah, חג חנוכה שמח‎

Lighting the Chanukiah with the Jewish Museum at the Museum of the Home in London last night (Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Four boys growing up in Dublin’s ‘Little Jerusalem’ and a synagogue fire

The former synagogue on Lennox Street in Little Jerusalem, Dublin … four children almost set it on fire 100 years ago in 1925 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Patrick Comerford

As a boy in Dublin, Clanbrassil Street and the labyrinth of streets leading off it offered a certain mystique and intrigue that stirred my youthful imagination. The area between Leonard’s Corner and Kelly’s Corner, and the streets nearby, was still known as ‘Little Jerusalem,’ and was still the heart of Dublin’s Jewish community in the 1950s and into the 1960s.

Although the drift to the southern suburbs of Terenure, Rathfarnham and Churchtown was already happening in the mid-1960s, Little Jerusalem was still an area with small kosher shops, fascia signs in mixtures of English and Hebrew lettering, and small terraced houses that included synagogues for tiny congregations even after the new synagogue opened on Rathfarnham Road, a few doors from the house where I was born.

The Levitas brothers, Max, Morry and Sol, lived on Longwood Avenue and Warren Street in Little Jerusalem Their friend Chaim Herzog lived on Bloomfield Avenue. These four boys were of my father’s generation. The Levitas brothers were the sons of Harry Levitas from the shtetl of Akmeyan in Lithuania and his wife Leah Rick from Riga in Latvia. Both parents fled the pogroms in Tsarist Russia in 1913. They met in Dublin, where both had family members, and they were married in Camden Street Synagogue in August 1914.

Harry Levitas became a prominent activist in the Amalgamated Jewish Tailors’, Machinists’ and Pressers’ Union. It was known in Dublin as ‘the Jewish Union’ and had offices in the same building as the Camden Street Synagogue, so that the house was said to have ‘Jerusalem on one floor, and the New Jerusalem on another’.

The childhood years of the Levitas brothers was marked by poverty, hardship and discrimination. From 1915 to 1927, the family lived in rooms in one house after another in Little Jerusalem: 15 Longwood Avenue (1915), 8 Warren Street (1916-1925) and one single room at 13 Saint Kevin’s Parade (1925-1927).

Max Samuel Levitas was born at 15 Longwood Avenue on 1 June 1915; his brothers, Maurice (1917-2001) and Sol (1917-2001), were born at Warren Street. Another brother Isaac, who was born at Warren Street in 1922, died as a thirteen-month-old infant in a tragic accident in the family home in March 1923. A sister Celia was born at Warren Street in 1923, and a daughter Toby was born later after the family emigrated.

During those childhood years in Little Jerusalem, the Levitas boys attended Saint Peter’s Church of Ireland National School on New Bride Street, beside the Meath Hospital. Their father struggled to earn a living, sometimes dealing in scrap metal, at other times as a travelling salesman, but more often as a tailor’s presser. But he was always an active trade unionist.

The Camden Street Synagogue closed in 1916, and the Levitas family then attended Lennox Street Synagogue, around the corner from their home on Warren Street. It was founded in 1887, and was one of the many small hebroth or shuls in the area set up by recent immigrants from Lithuania and Poland.

Late one Saturday in 1925, the synagogue almost went up in smoke. It was not, however, attempted arson. Four young boys had been anxious to bring the Sabbath to a speedy conclusion in order to go back to playing on the street. They came back into the synagogue to hastily say the final prayers, and accidentally knocked over a candle that set a cloth alight. Other versions of the incident say they knocked over a candle while trying to access the synagogue wine. Whatever the cause, the small blaze was quickly extinguished.

The four ‘culprits’ were the three Levitas brothers – Max, Maurice and Sol Levitas – and Chaim Herzog, the son of the Chief Rabbi, Dr Yitzhak Herzog. The fourth boy, Chaim Herzog (1918-1997), was born in Belfast but had moved to Dublin with his parents in 1919 and lived on Bloomfield Avenue.

Chaim Herzog later went to secondary school in Wesley College, and would become the President of Israel (1983-1993). The other three boys in the incident, the Levitas brothers, moved with their parents that year to one room in 13 Saint Kevin’s Parade. A few doors away was another small shul, the ultra-orthodox Machzikei haDas, founded at No 7 in 1883. But the Levitas family stayed there for less than two years, and eventually moved to the East End of London, where the boys would become heroes in the Battle of Cable Street.

When Harry Levitas was blacklisted by employers for his union activism, the family was forced to move to Glasgow in 1927. In 1930, they moved to Whitechapel in the East End of London, where Harry had two sisters. As teenagers in the East End, the three Levitas boys from Dublin became active in politics. At 19, Max became an East End hero when he was arrested with Jack Clifford for daubing anti-Fascist slogans on Nelson’s Column in 1934.

When Oswald Mosley tried marching through the largely Jewish East End with his blackshirts in 1936, the Levitas brothers resisted and took part in the Battle of Cable Street. By then Max was 21, working as a tailor’s presser in a small workshop in Commercial Street, but Maurice and Sol were still in their teens.

Maurice ‘Morry’ Levitas joined the Connolly Column of the International Brigade in 1937 to fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. He spent eleven months in jail, where he suffered violent interrogations, arbitrary beatings, and mock executions before he was released in a prisoner exchange in 1939. During the Second World War, he served in India and Burma with the Royal Army Medical Corps. He later worked as a plumber, teacher and lecturer.

Max led a twenty-one-week rent strike in Whitechapel in 1939, and in September 1940 he led the occupation of the Savoy Hotel’s deep bomb shelters that were reserved for Savoy patrons. The protest forced the authorities to open up Underground stations as bomb shelters for the rest of World War II. Max was elected as a Communist borough councillor in Stepney in the East End in 1945, and he held his seat for a further seventeen years.

Members of the extended Levitas family suffered the fate of many Jews during the Holocaust. Their aunt Sara was burnt to death along with fellow-villagers in the synagogue of Akmeyan; their aunt Rachel was killed with her family by the Nazis in Riga; an uncle was murdered in Paris by the Gestapo.

Max and Maurice Levitas frequently returned to the Dublin of their childhood. Maurice was honoured with Spanish citizenship in 1996 and was among the surviving veterans of the International Brigade who received a civic reception in the Mansion House in 1997. He died in 2001.

Max was in Ireland for the last time in 2015 to re-visit Little Jerusalem, the houses that had been childhood homes, and the former synagogue on Lennox Street. He too received a civic reception in the Mansion House. Max celebrated his 100th birthday in Whitechapel in 2015, when he received personal greetings from President Michael D. Higgins. He died on 2 November 2018. A block of flats on Jubilee Street in Stepney was named Levitas House in 2020 in his honour.

As for the former synagogue that almost burned down 100 years ago, it closed its doors in 1974 and the congregation moved to Stratford College on Zion Road, Rathgar, where it continued to worship until 1981.

Further reading:

Nick Harris, Dublin’s Little Jerusalem (Dublin, 2002).
Cormac Ó Gráda, Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History (Princeton NJ and Oxford, 2006).
Manus O’Riordan, ‘Citizens of the Republic, Jewish History in Ireland,’ Dublin Review of Books, 2007, avaiable at: https://drb.ie/articles/citizens-of-the-republic-jewish-history-in-ireland/ (accessed 15 September 2025).
‘So Long, Max Levitas’, Spitalfields Life (4 November 2018), available at: https://spitalfieldslife.com/2018/11/04/so-long-max-levitas/ (accessed 15 September 2025)

The house on Bloomfield Avenue where Chaim Herzog lived as a child (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

This essay was published as ‘Four Boys Growing up in Dublin’s ‘Little Jerusalem’ and a Synagogue Fire’, pp 153-156, Chapter 36 in Childhood and the Irish, A miscellany, ed Salvador Ryan (Dublin: Wordwell, 2025), xviii + 344 pp, ISBN: 978-1-916742-19-2, lauched at the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, last Monday (1 December 2025)

Biographical note (p 340):

Patrick Comerford is an Anglican priest and a former professor in Trinity College Dublin and the Church of Ireland Theological Institute. He lives in retirement in Milton Keynes

With Professor Salvador Ryan (editor, second from left) and some of the other contributors at the launch of ‘Childhood and the Irish, A miscellany’ in the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, last Monday (1 December 2025)