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)

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)

Daily prayer in Ordinary Time 2026: 109, Tuesday 25 August 2026

‘For you clean the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence’ (Matthew 23: 25) … teacups in a painting in a restaurant in Listowel, Co Kerry (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

We are continuing in Ordinary Time in the Church Calendar and the week began with the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity (Trinity XII).

I am singing with the choir at a funeral in Saint Mary and Saint Giles Church, Stony Stratford, later this afternoon. But 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.

‘You … have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith’ (Matthew 23: 23) … the statue of Justice by John Van Nost (1721) in Dublin Castle (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Matthew 23: 23-26 (NRSVA):

[Jesus said:] 23 ‘Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practised without neglecting the others. 24 You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!

25 ‘Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. 26 You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may become clean.’

‘For you tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law’ (Matthew 23: 23) … two Sabbath spice boxes, part of the ritual of welcoming the Sabbath, in the Jewish Museum, Venice (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Today’s Reflection:

In the Beatitudes at the beginning of Saint Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says eight groups of people are blessed: ‘the poor in spirit … those who mourn … the meek … those who hunger and thirst for righteousness … the merciful … the pure in heart … the peacemakers … those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness …’ (Matthew 5: 3-10).

Now, as we come close to the end of this Gospel, we have seven groups of people who are condemned as hypocrites and against whom Jesus pronounces seven woes.

In the Gospel reading normally read on the Monday of this week, we hear the first three of these seven woes: woe to you who ‘lock people out of the kingdom of heaven’ (verse 13) … who ‘make the new convert twice as much a child of hell’ (verse 15) … and ‘blind guides’ who swear by the ‘gold of the sanctuary’ (verses 16-22).

We hear two further woes today (Matthew 23: 23-26): for those who tithe mint, dill, and cummin but neglect the weightier matters of justice, mercy and faith; and these who care about the details of domestic purity but neglect the cleanliness of their hearts and inner thoughts. Then, we hear the final of the seven woes tomorrow (Matthew 23: 27-32): a double woe on those who on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

A ‘woe’ is an exclamation of grief, similar to what is expressed by the word alas. In pronouncing woes, Jesus is prophesying judgment on the religious leaders of the day for their hypocrisy. He calls them hypocrites, blind guides, snakes and a ‘brood of vipers’.

Before Jesus condemns the hypocrisy of religious leaders, they have been following him to test him and try to trick him with questions about divorce (Matthew 19: 3), his authority (Matthew 21: 23), paying taxes to Caesar (Matthew 22: 17), the resurrection (Matthew 22: 23), and the greatest commandment of the law (Matthew 22: 36).

Jesus prefaces his seven woes by explaining to the disciples that they should obey the teachings of the religious leaders – as they teach the law of God – but not to emulate their behaviour because they do not practice what they preach (Matthew 23: 3).

The second grouping of these woes, which we read today, condemns the scribes and Pharisees for tithing mint, dill, and cummin but neglecting the weightier matters of justice, mercy and faith, for worrying about clean cups and plates outside, but neglecting the state of their inner thoughts (Matthew 23: 23-26).

The scribes and Pharisees are accused of making a big deal of small things like tithing spices, while they ignore more crucial matters. They diligently count their mint leaves to give every tenth one to the temple, but they neglect the more important matters of the law, such as justice, mercy and faith (verse 23).

Jesus is not saying tithing the mint, dill, and cumin is wrong. He says they should not neglected proper tithing, but it must be done with a good heart. Jewish law and tradition specifies tithes on some produce, generally food. But there was no tithe required for wild herbs, although this is debated in the Mishnah: ‘R. Eliezer says, “Dill is subject to the law of tithes [in regard to its] seeds, leaves and pods.” But Sages say, “Nothing is subject to the law of tithes [in regard to both its] seeds and leaves save cress and field rocket alone”.’ (m. Ma’as. 4: 5).

There is an issue of justice here. If a tithe that is not required in the law is demanded, then it not only deprives them of what is lawfully theirs, but in this case it may even deprive them of fully enjoying the Sabbath.

On the Sabbath, it is said, the ‘Sabbath Queen’ or the ‘Sabbath Bride’ descends from Heaven to heal the sufferings of the Jews. The arrival and departure of ‘Her Majesty’ is marked by ceremonies. When she enters, everybody is happy; when she leaves, there is a strange sadness. But people take comfort in a symbolic tradition that includes inhaling the aroma of spices contained in an ornamental box, often made of silver, the spice box.

Spice-boxes are an essential part of Havdalah (הַבְדָּלָה, ‘separation’), the ceremony marking the symbolic end of Shabbat and ushering in the new week. The spices are usually kept in decorative spice-boxes to beautify and honour the mitzvah and are handed around so that everyone can smell the fragrance. In many Sephardi and Mizrahi communities, branches of aromatic plants are used for this purpose, while Ashkenazim have traditionally used cloves.

A special braided Havdalah candle with more than one wick is lit, and a blessing is recited. If a special Havdalah candle is not available, two candles can be used, and the two flames joined when reciting the blessing. The traditional prayers include: ‘Praised are You, Adonai our God, who rules the universe, Creator of all kinds of spices.’

Turning to hyperbole, Jesus says the religious leaders can strain out a gnat when they are drinking but can swallow a camel (verse 24). In other words, they were careful to avoid offence in minor things of little importance, but ignore things that are much more difficult to swallow.

In the fifth woe, Jesus compares them to cups and plates that are scrupulously cleaned on the outside but left dirty inside. Their religious observances make them appear clean and virtuous, but inwardly, in their hearts, they are full of ‘greed and self-indulgence’ (verse 25).

It is not that washing my hands or cutlery and crockery before I eat is a bad idea, or that I am a hypocrite if I do so. If I habitually fail to wash my hands and the cups and plates before I eat, I am going to get sick, quickly and often.

But if I forget why I have to wash them, I am a hypocrite if I then expect others to do so. Indeed, sometimes we leave ourselves in danger of going hungry if we insist on everything being spotless before we eat: those facilities are not always to hand on a long train journey or a long flight, for flight, or while I’m at an all-day cricket match or at a rugby fixture.

The Pharisees had their own rituals, and I would be silly to think that only they had these problems. We all have our own rituals associated with eating and cleanliness.

It is said one of the principal causes of domestic arguments in the kitchen is about what way to stack the dishwasher, and how to empty it. Should the knives stand up or down? Which sides do you place the glasses and the cups on? Do you rinse the plates before they go in? To tell the truth, it probably does not matter. But it is still irritating to open the dishwasher and to find someone else has packed it.

The level of questioning of the Pharisees is about a ritual that is probably more important than how to stack the dishwasher. And the level of criticism from Jesus is not as rude as we might first think.

But when he says the Pharisees are hypocrites, Jesus is challenging them to drop the mask and to own the words they speak and to own the reasons for those rituals.

Can you imagine how much more positively people at large would view the churches if every parish and church put as much care into seeing that our children are not abused or infected with racism or discrimination or hatred as much as we put into seeing that the cups are clean for the tea and coffee after church, or as much as we attend to the cleanliness of the sacred vessels used for the Eucharist or Holy Communion?

If we are worried about how clean the patten and chalice are at Holy Communion, how clean the church is, how clean the coffee cup is when it comes out of the dishwasher, how much more should be worried about how clean the Church is as an institution, how worthy it is to be called – for us to be called – the Body of Christ.

‘For you clean the outside of the cup and of the plate’ (Matthew 23: 25) … a cup of coffee at Pavlos Beach in Platanias, near Rethymnon in Crete (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Today’s Prayers (Tuesday 25 August 2026):

In Pray with the World Church, the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), the theme this week, from 23 to 29 August 2026 (pp 32-33), is ‘Legacies of History’. This theme was introduced on Sunday with a reflection by the Revd Dr Rachele Evie Vernon O’Brien, a Jamaican-born theologian and advocate.

The USPG Prayer Diary today (Tuesday 25 August 2026) invites us to pray:

Lord God, forgive us for where our words have not matched our actions. Renew us, your Church, to live out the love we proclaim.

The Collect of the Day:

Almighty and everlasting God,
you are always more ready to hear than we to pray
and to give more than either we desire or deserve:
pour down upon us the abundance of your mercy,
forgiving us those things of which our conscience is afraid
and giving us those good things
which we are not worthy to ask
but through the merits and mediation
of Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Post-Communion Prayer:

God of all mercy,
in this eucharist you have set aside our sins
and given us your healing:
grant that we who are made whole in Christ
may bring that healing to this broken world,
in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Additional Collect:

God of constant mercy,
who sent your Son to save us:
remind us of your goodness,
increase your grace within us,
that our thankfulness may grow,
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Yesterday’s reflections

Continued tomorrow

‘For you tithe mint, dill, and cummin’ (Matthew 23: 23) … the former Tithe Barn in Thame, Oxfordshire (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

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

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)

In search of the lost mediaeval and war-time Jewish communities in the heart of Dunstable,

By late 1942, the Jewish congregation in Dunstable had moved to 132 Luton Road (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Patrick Comerford

It is quite some time since I posted a variety of blog postings on Friday evenings, reflecting on an aspect of Jewish spirituality and prayer life or looking at synagogues or the sites of synagogues I have visited and places of interest in Jewish history, culture and life.

However, with the rise in antisemitism across these islands in recent months, I suspended these posts, unwilling to identify the location of synagogues or Jewish sites I was visiting. My fears seemed to be confirmed when the former East London Central Synagogue on Nelson Street in the East End suffered an arson attack shortly after I had written about its sale and its past history.

However, when I was in Dunstable last week I decided to resume me searches, looking for the sites of places that had served as synagogues, albeit briefly, and searching for stories of local Jewish history and past Jewish communities in the south Bedfordshire town.

Dunstable, with a population of about 40,000, is the fourth largest town in Bedfordshire, about 30 km south-east of Milton Keynes, 8 km west of Luton and 50 km north of London.

There is no active, organised Jewish community or synagogue in Dunstable these days, and the nearest active Jewish congregation is Luton United Synagogue, about 8 km away. But Dunstable has had two Jewish communities in the past: a mediaeval community that survived until Edward I proclaimed the Edict of Expulsion in 1290; and a war-time community, mainly of evacuees, that lasted until the early 1950s.

Mediaeval Dunstable had a small but notable Jewish community in the 12th and 13th centuries. Thomas, the Prior of Dunstable, borrowed £50 from Aaron of Lincoln, a Jewish banker and financier, in 1185. Aaron of Lincoln (1123-1186) was a prominent financier and one of the wealthiest individuals in 12th century England. He ran a major banking network with agents across the country, he financed major building projects, including Dunstable Priory, St Albans Abbey, Lincoln Minster, Peterborough Abbey, and several cathedrals.

Aaron of Lincoln died in 1886, and three years later, during anti-Jewish riots and violence in 1189, the entire Jewish community in Dunstable was forced to choose accepting baptism or facing massacre.

However, Jews may have returned to the town quite quickly, albeit in small numbers. In what seems to have been an antisemitic diatribe in 1210, when a great storm destroyed the Priory Church, the Prior of Dunstable, Richard de Morins, documented his vision of two Jews who said the Anti-Christ would be born 40 years later.

Mossy, a Jew, unsuccessfully sued the same Prior of Dunstable for £700 in 1221. His friends paid the king a mark of gold and £100 to save him from hanging for forgery. A converted Jew named Henry obtained a letter from the Pope in 1275 promising that the prior, William le Breton, would maintain him and his family.

Following the Edict of Expulsion in 1290, all Jews were forced to leave England, effectively ending the mediaeval presence of Jews in Dunstable, although there is no record of the number forced of people who were forced to leave the town.

Aaron of Lincoln (1123-1186) financed major building projects, including Dunstable Priory (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

In the inter-war and war-time years, the Cohen family owned Barwythe Hall, near Dunstable, from 1931 until 1945. The most prominent member of the family was Harold Cohen (1873-1936), the Liverpool-born businessman, communal leader and philanthropist. He was a major benefactor to Liverpool University and Harold House, which was named in his honour, was the main centre for Jewish communal organisations, youth activities and social events in Liverpool from the 1920s until it closed in 2009.

In the mid-20th century, a modern Jewish community was established in Dunstable during World War II, mainly for evacuees who had fled from other parts of the UK.

The Dunstable United Synagogue Membership Group was formed following a meeting in October 1941 called by Jewish residents and World War II evacuees. During the war, the congregation first met in a hut until it was requisitioned by builders, with Jewish refugees worshipping at a temporary synagogue in Poynters Road, Dunstable.

The Revd Louis Blumenthal (1912-1985) was the minister in Dunstable from 1941 until at least 1943. He had previously served as the reader of Leyton and Walthamstow New Federated Synagogue, later known as Queen’s Road Synagogue, east London (1936-1939).

For most years, festival services were held in Dunstable Town Hall or in a school hall and Hebrew classes for the children were held by Rabbi Waxman at Burr Street School. Weekly Hebrew classes were held at Dunstable Grammar School and other schools in 1942.

By September 1942, the congregation had moved to 132 Luton Road, Dunstable, and this continued as the community address until at least late 1946. Following the appointment of the Revd Judah Hosea Rockman in 1946, Hebrew classes were held at two separate venues on Sunday mornings.

By 1946, the congregation was also using a temporary synagogue at Watling House, 123 High Street North, which was described as ‘very unsuitable’ and ‘bleak’. This developed into the Dunstable Hebrew Congregation, which was established about 1947. A hall adjoining 119 High Street North, Dunstable, was offered to the congregation in July 1947 for its exclusive and free use for services, classes and other activities by Barnett Green president of the congregation from 1947 to 1955.

The membership group was affiliated to the United Synagogue. When the war-time membership group scheme came to an end, the congregation was one of only five small membership groups that applied for affiliation status with the United Synagogue. The congregation became an affiliated synagogue of the United Synagogue in 1948.

The last recorded minister in Dunstable was the Revd I Gross, from 1950 until about 1952. There appears to have been no further references to the congregation in the Jewish Chronicle after 1951, the congregation had closed in 1955, and the Dunstable United Synagogue membership group, which met at the Town Hall, was disbanded by the mid-1950s.

For community events, religious services, or kosher resources today, most Jewish people living in the Dunstable and Central Bedfordshire area are connected with the Luton congregation. There is no Jewish cemetery in Dunstable, and Bushey Cemetery, about 30 km away, was established in 1947. Any former members of the Dunstable congregation were probably absorbed into the Luton Hebrew Congregation.

When I went looking for signs of the Jewish community in Dunstable last week, it seemed the two addresses at High Street North have been replaced in recent decades by social housing, although the house on Luton Road is still standing.

As for the former Dunstable Town Hall at 11 High Street North, which had hosted festival services for many years, it was sold in 1965 and demolished in 1966, and the site has been redeveloped for commercial purposes. The present building is a branch of the Santander bank, while the town hall has been located since the 1990s in the Grade II-listed Grove House.

Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום‎

The two buildings used by the Jewish community in Dunstable in the 1940s have been replaced in recent decades by social housing (Photographs: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

The ‘lost Jews’ of Malacca survived the Inquisition but are losing their language, heritage and identity

The Kristang or ‘Portuguese-Eurasians’ of Malacca include people of Sephardic descent

Patrick Comerford

During my first visit to Sarawak at the end of 2024, I tried to learn about the history and the stories of Malaysian Jews, and heard about the lost community of the Jews of Penang from Zayn Al-Abideen Gregory, the Kuching-based writer and academic and author of The Last Jews of Penang.

Penang was home to a Jewish community until the late 1970s. But there were Jewish communities in other parts of Malaysia too, especially in Negeri Sembilan and Malacca.

Traces of these lost Jewish communities were found among Mizrahi Jews, the majority of whom are Baghdadi Jews, Malabar Jews and Ashkenazi Jews. But there are also people of Sephardic descent who continue to live among the Kristang people and who have tried to maintain or recover their traditions.

The Kristang – also known as ‘Portuguese-Eurasians’ or ‘Malacca Portuguese’ – are a creole ethnic group of people primarily of Portuguese and Malay descent, but also with substantial Chinese and Indian ancestry. They are found mostly in Malaysia, Singapore and Australia.

The number of Kristang people is estimated at between 37,000 and 54,000 and in Malaysia they are found particularly in Malacca, Kuala Lumpur, Penang and Johor. Kristang groups are also found in Singapore, and due to significant migration in the second half of the 20th century there is a diaspora that has spread to Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.

The Jenti Kristang or Orang Serani people are predominantly Roman Catholics, but small numbers of them are Jews, and some are Sunni Muslims and secular people too. Their languages are Papia Kristang, English and Malay.

These people are mainly Malay and Portuguese in their ancestry, but they also have some Dutch ancestry due to intermarriage. This group emerged with their own particular identity in Malacca in the 16th and 17th centuries, when it was part of the Portuguese Empire. Today the Malaysian government classifies them as Portuguese-Eurasians.

The name Kristang comes from the Portuguese creole Kristang, meaning Christian, and in turn it is derived from the Portuguese Cristão. A derogatory term for the Malacca Portuguese community was Grago or Gragok, a slang term for Portuguese camarão (shrimp), referring to the fact that the Portuguese Malaccans were traditionally shrimp fishermen. They also call themselves Gente Kristang (Christian people).

The Padrão dos Descobrimentos or Monument to the Discoveries in Lisbon recalls the Portuguese explorers who set out for the new world (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Portugal was once one of the world’s largest and longest-lived maritime empires, with colonies that included Brazil in Latin America, many African countries such as Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, and many port cities throughout Asia, including Goa and Macao. Places that were once part of the Portuguese Empire remain home to small ethnic groups of mixed heritage such as the Macanese in Macau, and the Kristang people in Singapore and Malaysia, with their own unique languages.

The Kristang community traces its origins back to Portuguese sailors, soldiers and traders who came to Malacca during the age of Portuguese explorations and colonialism. There they formed relationships with local women who were indigenous people, Malays and Chinese.

The arrival of Vasco da Gama in India in 1498 sparked Portuguese interest in Malacca as a key, wealthy spice trade hub, and Malacca became a major destination in the great wave of sea expeditions launched by Portugal, becoming part of the Portuguese Empire. The first Portuguese expedition to reach Malacca landed in 1507. The geographic and fiscal advantages of Malacca were obvious, as one Portuguese official noted: ‘Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice’, the Venetians being the great rivals of the Portuguese as importers of spices to Europe.

In the early years, the Malays called the Portuguese Serani, a Malay contraction of the Arabic Nasrani, meaning followers of Jesus of Nazareth. One story records a Portuguese landing party inadvertently insulted the Malaccan sultan by placing a garland of flowers on his head, and he had them detained. A Portuguese fleet was sent from India to free the group in 1511 and then conquered Malacca.

From 1511 on, Portuguese officials encouraged the explorers to marry local indigenous women, under a policy endorsed by Afonso de Albuquerque, then Viceroy of India. The King of Portugal granted freeman status and tax exemption to Portuguese men (casados) who ventured overseas and married local women. With Albuquerque’s encouragement, these mixed marriages flourished and 200 were recorded by 1604, leading to new families and settled communities.

The Dutch took Malacca from the Portuguese in 1641, and almost all political contact between Portugal and Malacca ended. A large number of people of Portuguese descent were sent to Batavia (now Jakarta), the Dutch East India Company headquarters, as war captives and there they settled in an area called Kampung Tugu.

The tomb of Vasco da Gama in the church in Belém in Lisbon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Even after Portugal lost Malacca in 1641, the Kristang community largely preserved its traditions, practicing Catholicism and using the Portuguese language, and they also absorbed some Dutch crypto-Catholics.

Many Sephardic Jews from Portugal and around the Red Sea and Malabar settled in Malacca in the 16th and 17th centuries, and then assimilated into the local Portuguese-Malay community to escape persecution. They were anusim or conversos – Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism under the pressure of the Inquisition. It continued in the Portuguese colonies until 1821, enforcing Catholic orthodoxy, policing ‘blood purity’, suppressing heresy, and persecuting Jewish ‘New Christians’, often resorting to extreme severity, including public torture and execution.

In the 16th century, Malacca was a significant hub for these communities, with reports of active, though often hidden, Jewish culture. Many of the Jews who remained in Malacca during Portuguese rule (1511-1641) integrated into the local Eurasian or Kristang community, which carries a mixture of Portuguese, Dutch, Jewish, and local Malay heritage.

Diego Hernández Vitoria ‘the elder’ (or Diogo Fernandes Victória) was a Portuguese merchant from Porto but also a Judaeo-converso and one of the most important Sephardic merchants in the late 16th century. He protected and financially helped the Judaeo-conversos who were poor or on the run and also tried to develop a closer relationship with the Jesuits.

Diego Hernández Vitoria lived in Spanish America, South-East Asia and Manila. His commercial network extended through Mozambique, Mombasa, Cambay, Gujarat, Sindh, Bijapur, Golconda, Malabar, Ceylon, Coromandel, Bengal, Orissa, Pegu, Siam, Malacca, Moluccas, China and Japan. In these places, 89 per cent of Vitoria’s investments were centred on trade with China and Japan. But because his Jewish origins were well-known In Malacca, he was ostracised by the resident Portuguese trading community.

Thanks to the protection that Vitoria granted to the Judaeo-conversos living between China, Japan and the Philippines, it is possible to list the main traders of Jewish ancestry who had settled in the region: Afonso Vaez, Diego Jorge, Francisco Rodrigues Pinto, Francisco Vaez, Góis, Luís Rodrigues (Manuel Fernandes), Manuel de Mora, Manuel Farias (Manuel Faria), Manuel Gil de la Guardia, Manuel Rodrigues (Manuel Rodrigues Navarro), Paulo Gonçalves, Pero Nabo, Pero Rodrigues, Rui Perez and Vilela Vaz.

The rules surrounding ‘the status of purify of blood’ (limpeza de sangue) blocked any convert or a descendant of converts from many spheres of public activity, and from many privileges, including honorific titles. This discriminatory legislation was based on racial criteria: it was no longer a question of religion but of ‘blood’. One had to provide a certificate, following thorough genealogical investigations, going back as far as possible in the lineage, that one had no Jewish ancestor in his genealogical tree.

A memorial at the Igreja e Convento de Sao Bento da Vitória in Porto apologises for the treatment of Jews during the Portuguese Inquisition (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The Inquisition continued its presence until the Dutch captured Malacca in 1641. Because of its persecution of Jews, many of the Jews of Malacca assimilated into the Kristang community. Most of the Sephardic-Asian creoles became genuine Christians, but in some cases, conversos managed to preserve their Jewishness in secret.

Nowadays, intermarriage occurs more frequently between Kristang and people of Chinese and Indian ethnicity rather than Malay because of religious laws that require non-Muslims who marry Malay Muslims first to convert to Islam.

The Kristang people in Malaysia do not have full bumiputera status, a status that applies to indigenous ethnic groups. Since Portuguese times, the Kristang have been living by the sea. It is still an important part of their culture. Even today, with only 10 percent of the community earning their living by fishing, many men go fishing to supplement their income.

Kristang traditional music and dance, such as the Branyo and the Farrapeira are derived from Portuguese folk dances, Kristang or Malacca Portuguese cuisine is similar to the Eurasian cuisine of Singapore and Malaysia, and the Kristang people traditionally used Portuguese and Christian first names, while their surnames were Portuguese.

In general the Kristang practice Roman Catholicism. Christmas (Natal) is the most festival and celebrate many saints’ days, including Saint John (San Juang) on 24 June and Saint Peter (San Pedro) on 29 June.

Kristang Jews are a small, often hidden, subgroup. They trace their ancestry to the Sephardic Jews who survived the Inquisition in Portuguese-controlled Malacca. They had assimilated into the Catholic Kristang community but retained some residual cultural practices. These ‘hidden’ Sephardic Jews are identified in a number of analyses of Asian communities with Jewish roots.

In recent decades, some Kristang people were interested in rediscovering their forgotten Jewish heritage. This led to the formation of the Kristang Community for Cultural Judaism (KCCJ) in 2010, although it is no longer active. Edgar Pinto Xavier also wrote a book about the Jewish history of Malaysia and how the Inquisition persecuted heretics and non-Christians in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Asia.

Today the Kristang community in Malaysia is primarily based in the Portuguese Settlement in Ujong Pasir, Malacca. They speak Papia Kristang (Malacca Portuguese Creole), a language that continues to mark them out from their Chinese and Malay neighbours.

The Kristang language is threatened with extinction and is classified as critically endangered by Unesco. The work of Kristang language activists has been compared by one writer to that of Yiddishists. But their work in Malaysia and Singapore is no guarantee that Kristang will survive as a living language for future generations.

Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום‎

The Melaka or Malacca River … once known to European seafarers as the ‘Venice of the East’ (Photograph: Engin Akyurt - Pixabay / Wikipedia)