The Lost Jewish City of Thessaloniki - How Greece Destroyed the Largest Sephardic Community on Earth

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This is a story about a city, about the people who once lived there and the few who still do.

This is a story about memory, about the past haunting, the present and the present, echoing the past.

It's a story about loss, about what's been stolen and about what we've given away.

It's a story I didn't realize I was a part of, and now.

It's a story you are a part of too halfway around the world, nestled along the northwest corner of the Aian Sea, sits the port city of Thessaloniki, a city you've maybe only heard about if you're Greek or a hardcore history buff, or maybe you're a child of its Sephardic or Roman Jewish commun.

Thessaloniki was home to one of the world's most ancient Jewish societies.

Our earliest record of it found in the writings of St.

Paul, the apostle, who traveled there to preach in three of the city's synagogues during the first century ce as empires rose and fell, the Jewish community of Solanica, as it was also known, stayed steady until a generational calamity shook things loose.

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and also it sucked if you were a Jew.

The Alhambra decree, the Spanish Inquisition, Jews on the run, Spaniards being hostile to Jews.

Imagine that.

The Ottoman Turks, who by this point had conquered Greece, sensed an opportunity to populate its territory with well-educated and industrious subjects.

So they opened Solana's Glittering port to welcome Spain's expelled Sardi Jews, Ladino speaking, Jews poured in from Majorca, Catalonia Valencia, Toto, Sicily, cia, Napoli, Portugal, Ashkenazi Jews from Transylvania, Austria, Hungary.

All joined their Romano, Jewish brethren from Greece to form one of the world's only Jewish majority cities, a thriving cultural and commercial hub by the sea dubbed the Mother of Israel, Solana's Jewish population reached 75,000 by the early 20th century, was also the largest concentration of Sephardic Jews anywhere on earth, a port, a focal point of trade and commerce.

Was closed on Shabbat because all its workers were Jewish.

Talmud.

Torah, Haga, an educational institution of more than 10,000 students, was a major European center of Torah learning.

The cemetery.

A sprawling 4 million square foot site containing 400,000 Jewish Graves was the largest cemetery in Europe.

Thessaloniki was truly a global bastion of Jewish life.

No wonder it was known for centuries as the Jerusalem of the Balkans.

So how come you never heard about it?

Well, for one, as I've discussed several times on this program, we've not invested in comprehensive Jewish education that teaches us our history as a diasporic, interconnected global tribe.

Now, thankfully, that's beginning to change, but we've still got a long way to go.

Second.

Well, let's get back to the story.

The disappearance of Jewish Thessaloniki began in 1913 with the unification of Greece.

Suddenly there was a new administration with Greek nationalism on the brain.

In 1917, a devastating fire ravaged the city, decimating the central district where most of the Jews lived, rendering 50,000 Jewish people homeless, sensing an opportunity to at last, remake the city in their own image.

The Greek government forbade Jews from rebuilding their destroyed community as it had been.

In fact, the city's reconstruction plan actively broke up the Jewish communal way of life.

Interspersing Christians and Muslims throughout the neighborhood, pushing out many Jews entirely.

The 1923 Treaty of Lauzen triggered a population swap between Greece and Turkey that brought 100,000 more Greek Christians into the territory.

And after nearly half a millennium, Theon, Nicki's Jewish majority was no more.

If you've been paying attention to the chronology, I'm guessing you have some idea of where the story goes next.

1941, the Nazis arrive and occupy Greece at the time.

Solana's Jews numbered over 55,000 in March of 1943.

The city is emptied of its Jewish population entirely.

A few thousand make it to Athens or other parts of the Italian zone, a few hundred hide or fight with the partisans.

The other 50,000 are packed onto trains, deported to Auschwitz and gassed.

By the end of the war, just one year later of Thessaloniki, 55,000 Jews, less than 2000, are still alive.

An annihilation rate of 96%, what most people might call a genocide.

Before the war, this Jerusalem of the Balkans was home to 45 synagogues.

By 1943, there was only one.

That cemetery with its 400,000 Jewish bodies that belonged to the community for almost 500 years.

Well, the Greek authorities took advantage of the Nazi occupation to raise the whole place, steal the marble gravestones to use for roads, courtyards, cafeterias, latrines.

Even a church.

Aristotle University, one of the biggest in Greece, was built right on top.

The Jews, of course, received no compensation for this 86 acre piece of land, or the invaluable treasures destroyed within.

So why am I telling you all this?

Well, for one thing, you deserve to know Solanica was a jewel of Jewish life, and you should know about this special one of a kind place.

It's a travesty that Thessaloniki isn't widely known throughout the Jewish community.

Though of course, it's hard for folks to learn about a place when its entire footprint has been erased, as if the flourishing Jewish society that lived and breathed there for centuries had never existed at all as former BJJP guest, Dara Horn says, it's not enough to learn about how Jews died.

We must also learn and celebrate how they lived.

The people of Solanica deserve to be known and remembered not for the horrific way they were deleted from the world, but for the way they lived and thrived.

I also needed to talk to you about Solanica because I was just there.

I spent a week in Greece, in Solanica, Corfu, and Athens with Jewish federation's, national Young Leadership Cabinet.

Shout out to ra, and I gotta tell you, it was kind of a bummer, meaningful, educational, fun, totally worthwhile.

But kind of a drag man in Thessaloniki.

We visited the one Jewish museum.

The one synagogue heard from some of the local Jews still there fighting for their place in public consciousness.

We visited the empty parking lot that was recently approved to be turned into a Jewish memorial square, and we saw the single memorial statue honoring all that was and will never be again.

I told you this was a story about the past returning to haunt the present.

The present, returning to greet the past.

We visited the memorial at the old Jewish cemetery.

Just a small patch of grass and concrete, now hidden somewhere inside Aristotle University's ugly hulking gray campus.

And as we approached this unsatisfactory excuse for remembrance, what delightful decoration did we find Festoon the surrounding curb.

Zionists not welcome death to the IDF.

Bold red graffiti letters, not 20 feet from the memorial of the cemetery that used to be the largest Jewish burial ground on earth in the largest Jewish majority city on earth, all of which was destroyed by the non-Jewish Greeks whose grandkids probably sprayed the graffiti, housed that for inversion.

As human beings, we are capable of great empathy, but there are some things in life you just can't fully understand unless you live them.

To travel the world as a Jew or as a person interested in Jewish history is to visit town after town, city, after city, in country after country where our people and the rich communities they built have been disappeared from the face of the earth.

Like an alien ship flew overhead and just sucked the entire thing into the void of space without a sound.

Well, this luxury condo, it used to be the home of a Jewish family whose textile business clothed and fed the community until they were dragged out of that home dispossessed of their business by their own neighbors and murdered.

Here's a plaque where the Jewish elementary School used to be on the wall of this cell phone store.

Here's our little Jewish museum with whatever.

The nice neighbors who didn't steal all our stuff while we were in the death camps gave back to us when a dozen of us returned.

Please purchase these gift shop items made in Israel 'cause there's no one left here to make them anymore.

Enjoy our fair city where none of the people walking around have any idea that Jews ever lived here at all.

And yet, despite our erasure at Greek Christian hands, despite a modern day Jewish population of less than 6,000, across the entire country of 10 million, every city we visited was covered in anti Jew graffiti.

And yes, Zionists not welcome death to the IDF and fuck Israel are not just anti-Israel.

They're anti-Jewish because you don't see anyone else anywhere else, spray, painting, anything like this about any other country all over their city walls.

And yes, baby murdering Jew cunts is also anti Jew, in case there was any doubt but points for originality.

To be honest, the graffiti wasn't even something that registered for me at first.

I'm used to the hate speech, both from online exposure and from having visited several European countries in the past two years, but I recognize that my peers were not used to it and were deeply shaken by it.

They were shaken by the sheer boldness of it, how loud and seemingly ubiquitous it was, and it was all in English.

A unified expression of hate spanning the globe, ensuring maximum understanding and engagement.

There are worse things than hateful graffiti, but it ain't fun.

You know, we did have some wonderful interactions with the Greek Jewish communities of Athens and Solanica, but all were bittersweet because there's just no escaping the feeling of where the hell is everybody.

Add to that our daily cadre of plain clothes, arm security guards, and full multi-car police escorts everywhere we went.

Our instructions to avoid the Spanish fans of visiting Sock.

Routine for our rabbi to remove his kippah as we toured the Acropolis and the cherry on top.

All the shit we're already carrying inside is engaged.

Diasporic Jews in an increasingly hostile Western world.

All of that, all of that taken together, that's just a little taste of what it's like to walk around as a member of the Jewish people.

Today, we've grown so accustomed to living this way.

Sometimes we don't even realize it's there, this weight.

This subtle heaviness, this invisible layer of muck we have to drag our feet through as we move about the world.

And this isn't a woe is me moment, but an honest recognition that there's a reason why something, a seemingly fun and carefree is a tour through grease might feel challenging or slightly off kilter or a little hollow or just hard.

And on top of that weight, there's also the armor.

Not the physical kind Israeli Jews need, but the psychological kind the rest of us do.

Every morning, whether you realize it or not, you are loading up your invisible armor, preparing yourself to face whatever public atrocity or personal betrayal or ignorant hate you'll have to weather as you go about your day.

The full experience of being an engaged Jew today is so layered, so nuanced, so isolating, and so unique that it is frankly impossible to fully understand or even articulate without feeling it in your own body.

In a previous monologue about maintaining mental clarity, I introduced my idea of the Jeremiah effect.

When the world around you has been ideologically captured and everyone is shouting the same ideas that you know to be wrong by default, you are going to feel alone and you're gonna feel a little crazy.

You know what you know to be true is true, and what you know to be right is right.

But then why are you the only one saying it?

That will make you feel crazy, but you're not embracing as progressive an ideology that has you assume the worst of an entire group of people.

Based on DIS and misinformation, no less.

That's crazy.

At the end of these cabinet trips, we gather in smaller groups to reflect on the experience and what I absorbed from the session this time was that some of my peers, and so I'm assuming a lot of you out there are scared.

I understand.

If that is you, I would first challenge you to go through the exercise of forcing yourself to name the exact and precise, literal thing you're afraid of, and assess if that's likely to occur or how to avoid it, or if it's in fact worthy being scared of.

But ultimately, whether you're scared or not, it's fine.

I don't need you to not be scared.

What I do need you to be is brave, even if you're scared.

We need you out here anyway.

Some of you are also waiting for some signaler to have your name called, but that's not how it works.

We need you out here anyway.

We have got to normalize Jews taking up space in public period.

We will never accomplish anything by withholding or diminishing ourselves for safekeeping or for the comfort of those who might despise us.

We have to continue exposing our societies to the immutable existence of proud Jews in their midst.

Too many of us continue to reach for the security blanket of being able to hide our identities.

Unlike most people of color who have no choice but to confront the world as they are, many Jews can and do opt out.

And while that's been a useful survival tactic in extreme times, it hurts us today.

It weakens our presence, dilutes our power, shifts responsibility for change away from the collective and onto the shoulders of the few.

Imagine how different things might look in the public square.

If the millions of American Jews hiding in plain sight suddenly switched on.

Not easy to be so brazen or ignorant when the subject of your ire is constantly staring you in the face.

In life.

We teach people how to treat us.

And if we, Jews, don't allow ourselves to even be encountered.

We're not giving ourselves the chance to teach anybody anything about us at all.

And I know it can feel risky that simply being openly and comfortably Jewish is to stick your head above the parapet.

But it's also an enormous risk not to, because you're not giving yourself the opportunity for something good to happen.

People will surprise you.

There are moments of connection and support and learning waiting all around us, but you'll never experience them if you stay in hiding.

It's like the great one.

Wayne Gretzky once said, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

Ask yourself, what's the alternative?

Be a closeted Jew who lives inauthentically, shrinking yourself forever, hoping this will all just go away.

That's not a story with a happy ending.

I am not suggesting you need to be reckless.

There's a difference between wearing your fancy watch to work and wearing it in the worst part of town at two in the morning.

Don't be an idiot, but don't be a coward either.

If today's climate is a parallel to Europe in the thirties, we've seen who the enablers of hate are.

The neighbors willing to flip on us on a dime We've seen who's rising to the occasion and taking up the fight, and we're also seeing which folks would rather surrender their agency and allow events to unfold around them.

With no input and no impact.

Farming out their future to others while clinging to the prayer that things will sort themselves out.

I don't think that's the kind of person any of us wants to be.

How you do anything is how you do everything.

So approach your role with intention or by default, you're not gonna have a role at all.

If there's one more thing I learned from my time in Greece, it's that carrying around your invisible armor cannot be the most Jewish thing about you.

We have to balance the fight for Jewish integrity and respect with the pursuit of Jewish meaning and joy and community.

The real reward of these cabinet trips, it's not the travel or the museums, or the meeting with ambassadors.

Shout out to Kimmy G, but the opportunity to enjoy those activities with wonderful people, the source of the meaning and joy in community.

Too many Jews treat the positive aspects of being Jewish as an add-on or something to think about after the whole fighting hate thing.

But the investment in meaning and joy and community, that is the thing, and you owe it to both your mental health and your soul to approach it with the same level of intention, time and energy as you do the other stuff.

So that's the story.

If you wanna support the Jewish communities of Thessaloniki or Athens, put a bunch of links in the show notes where you can do that.

And after you've done that, share this story.

Tell your kids and your colleagues and your friends about our people.

'cause like it or not, it's your story now too.

We're all a part of it.

And how the next chapter gets written from here is up to each and every one of us.

What sort of ending will you write?