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The fate of the Material Evidence of the Jews of Greece |
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By Nicholas Stavroukakis
The material culture of the Jews of Greece consists primarily
of mute evidence of their history in the form of objects, either
of secular or liturgical use, synagogues and cemeteries. By the
mid seventies, some thirty years after the disaster of the Axis
occupation of Greece, much of this evidence was made the more silent
and in many cases opaque and ambiguous as elderly survivors died
and took with them the last memories of the daily and religious
life of Jews in Greece. How this evidence survived, was collected,
conserved, and as far as was possible, documented is the subject
of this paper.
In the course of the Axis occupation of Greece between 1941 and
1945, almost all documentary evidence of Jewish life in the form
of community records and libraries had been, for the most part,
systematically confiscated by the Nazis or simply thrown to the
winds. Apparently, save in the case of Salonika, there was no overall ‘policy’ which
may reflect the divided attention given to the application of the ‘Final
Solution’ by the Italian and Bulgarian co-belligerents of the Germans.
In Salonika the use of shock, delusion and subsequent harnessing
of the mechanism of implosion was not repeated as efficiently elsewhere
in Greece. The almost immediate appropriation of Jewish communal
wealth secured by the arrest and subsequent ransom of some 5000
Jewish men in the city was only the first step in the process of
assisting the community to destroy itself. The weak and divided
leadership of the community organized by the Nazis but weeks after
their arrival under the authority not of a president but of the
chief rabbi of the city was, as might be expected, ineffective
but also assisted in the furtherance of a hope for some form of
modus vivendi. It was through this leadership that the delusion
of re-settlement in a Jewish ‘reserve’ near Cracow lulled many
into false hopes of what would be a difficult period of transition
but not unlike what the some 1,000,000 Christians Greeks (many
of whom had been settled in Salonika) had themselves faced between
1924-1927. This initial ‘action’ was followed by the designation
of specific ghettos into which all of the Jews were required to
take residence thus cutting them off from normal urban life. The
confiscation of personal wealth through subterfuge and deception
was put into effect at the same time. As if to emphasize the permanent
nature of this process the great Jewish necropolis that lay just
to the east of the city beyond its ancient walls was confiscated
and then given over to complete destruction. Covering an expanse
of some 324,000 square metres it contained the graves of over 300,000
Jews - most marked with stones many of which could be dated back
into Byzantine and Late Roman times. For centuries this venue had
provided a vibrant link between the living and the dead and was
itself a sign of some form of permanency and continuity. By the
March of 1943 when the deportations began, the Jews had become
a confused, impoverished and deluded mass of people that had no
leadership to speak of. What remained of their daily lives had
been for the most part abandoned and subsequently vandalized.
At the termination of the War Jewish survivors who returned from
the camps or who had gone into hiding during the Occupation immediately
set about trying to salvage what could be saved of Jewish property
- communal or private - that had either been parceled out by the
Nazis or had been seized by squatters or even legalized theft.
What had been lost forever can only be guessed at, as we shall
see, by what eventually was saved. However, the programmed efficiency
of the deportation of the Jews of Salonika was not repeated elsewhere
in Greece.
Communal records, religious artifacts from synagogues, entire
libraries and archives recording the history of communities and
individuals never emerged and even after the settlement of property
and the establishment of legal tenure by a Central Board of Jewish
Communities or KIS (the first such organization in the modern Greek
State). Abandoned synagogues, schools, and other communal buildings
and cemeteries
were apparently all that remained of a 2000 years old patrimony.
Despite the enormity of the catastrophe that struck Jewish fortunes
and life in Greece between 1941 and 1945, one must avoid the temptation
to magnify its impact beyond proportions. It has been a temptation
for scholars and individuals to assume that what was lost between
1941 and 1945 in Salonika (and elsewhere) was an intact patrimony
reflecting essentially Sephardi religious life in the city through
some 33 synagogues and their rich contents of communal records
and libraries - and the intact cemetery - the inscriptions in which
went back well over a millennium.. However, on several occasions
in the 16th century fires destroyed sizeable portions of the city
where Jews lived in close proximity to synagogues that were destroyed
along with domestic dwellings. These fires alone must have initially
destroyed whatever may have been brought from Iberia in the previous
century but also undoubtedly destroyed as well archives, libraries,
and liturgical art that may even have been passed on from Byzantine
times. Such fires were somewhat commonplace and a subject of great
concern to Ottoman authorities though perhaps the greatest of these
was that of the August of 1917, but five years after the city’s
annexation by Greece, when the entire Jewish quarter along with
almost all of its synagogues and oratories was destroyed. The years
following this catastrophe were quite difficult for the Salonika’s
Jews as they were as a community still in the midst of coming to
terms with Greek national identity and not always surrounded by
a sympathetic non-Jewish urban population. By the mid-twenties
the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey saw the departure
of the Muslims from Greece and the arrival of over a million or
so Greek Christians from Asia Minor many of whom were settled in
Salonika and its environs. Up-rooted on the basis of modern nationalist
norms of identity, these Asia Minor Greeks, many of whom did not
speak Greek nor had they ever felt any deep identity with the Greek
State (being Ottoman subjects) found themselves in a city that
was still predominantly Jewish, Spanish speaking and facing ambiguous
responses from the government and Orthodox Church. Despite these
disadvantages and faced with perhaps even a certain animosity,
all of the synagogues destroyed in the great fire of 1917 were
restored by 1929, however, their contents and those of private
dwellings were for the most part lost forever.
With the exception
of Rhodes, Hania, Corfu, Komotini, and Kastoria cities in Greece
that had Jewish communities and synagogues of some antiquity, this
was not always the case. At least twice after 1821 the Kal Yashan
or old Synagogue of Ioannina was destroyed by fire. The synagogue
of Halkida also went up in flames in 1841 leaving behind tantalizing
stories of communal documents and archives that were destroyed
at the time. Such ‘events’ affected as well synagogues in Larissa
and Trikala.
Even during the Occupation the fate of synagogues
and even cemeteries was not consistent though one notes uniformly
the absence of Jewish communal archives after the War. Most of
the synagogues in Salonika were destroyed though the most recently
founded Monasteriote synagogue (1929) was given to the Red Cross.
A good number, however, survived the War and were later passed
into secular hands or razed. The Synagogues of Patras, Rhodes and
Verroia were simply locked up with most of their contents. That
of Kos was sacked as was the synagogue of Etz Hayyim in Hania Crete
which was given over to squatters. The great synagogue of Komotini
was savaged as was that of Didimoteicho and what was left of the
recently built synagogue of Xanthi for all purposes a shell, was
given to the civic authorities. The Kal Yashan or Old Synagogue
of Ioannina was set given to the civic authorities as a possible
library. The silence of these destroyed communities at the end
of the War was almost total - all written records had vanished
or been carried out of Greece - and if one was to attempt to construct
some semblance of a history of Greek Jewry it was only through
what might have materially survived the catastrophe.
It is necessary
to mention at this point that the material evidence of the Jewish
presence in what constitutes the modern Greek state is made a quite complex
matter when one considers that the Jewish communities under the
Ottomans were inter-connected in a wide web of greater Jewish dispersion
that in relatively ‘contemporary’ times (i.e. from the 15th cent.)
cent.) was highly complex but also evolved with understandable
indifference to what we consider national boundaries today. Within
the Balkans and Western Anatolia Jewish communites were united
by common economic interests but also language (either Greek, Ladino)
and a sense of common tradition (either Romantiot or Sephardi)
Salonika maintained very close contacts with Monastir, Sophia,
Kavalla, Serres and Larissa. Ioannina was closely bound by common
Romaniote roots to Corfu, Preveza, Arta and Kastoria and Istanbul
Greek speaking Jews. Rhodes was a world unto itself and maintained
close ties with Kos and Izmir as well as Bodrum. This wide dispersion
of Jewish contacts was to create a significant problem at the time
of defining the scope of interest and concern of a Jewish Museum
of Greece as any study of its material evidence was going to cut
across national borders.
It was only in the mid 1970’s that some
attempt was made to collect some of the material evidence of Jewish
life as it had been lived prior to the War. Asher Moises, a Ioannina
Jew who was highly active in the Athens Jewish Community and also
the President of B’nei Brith, put together a quite idiosyncratic
collection of Jewish artifacts that constituted the “B’nei rith ‘Museum’’.
Nothing in the collection was documented or identified other than
by a short label - and it was closed to the public constituting
for all practical purposes a private ‘museum’. Like the Jewish
Summer Camp, or the idea of a Jewish Home for the Aged, it was
a feeble but well intentioned attempt to come to terms with loss
- but it also reflects the understandable lack of leadership that
characterized most if not all reconstructed Jewish communities
in Greece after the War.
In 1975-6 I was approached by Mr Noulis
Vital who was at that time the president of the Athens Jewish Community.
He and two friends, Elias Almosninos and Moise Consantini were
interested in the idea of making a proper Jewish Museum that was
to represent some aspect of the renewed life of the Jewish Community
of Athens. I was asked what I thought of the idea and its feasibility
on the basis of the fact that for some years I had been concerned
about the fate of Jewish material evidence as I had very early
become aware of the fate of the libraries and communal records
hence all that one could count on were objects that might reflect
a formerly rich but possibly in contemporary terms, not representative
collection of artifacts.. I had already in fact actually collected
some of these e.g., the iron Magen David that once was attached
to the shattered gates of the cemetery of Hania, a copper mug with
the name ‘Hayyim’ that I found on Rhodes, a
small tinned tray with not only a magen david but also a Hebrew inscription
and several other items. There was of course as well the B’nei
Brith ‘collection’ - but I was also told about a large collection
of objects seized by the Bulgarians in Kavala from Jews who had
been arrested and were destined to be sent to the camps. These
had been recorded in detail and then stored in sealed containers
in Bank of Bulgaria and at the termination of the War had presented
a ‘problem’ until it was felt that they should be returned to Greece.
From what I could cull from our initial conversation and the proposal
that I might wish to assume an operative and active role in making
a proper museum, I was especially intrigued by this ‘Bulgarian’ material.
The Jews of Thrace had a fate that was made additionally more sinister
by the fact that they had been de facto nationalized as Bulgarians
just after the annexation of Thrace and parts of Macedonia by the
Bulgarians in 1941. The some 5000 Jews who were assembled in Kavala
for deportation in 1943 were substituted for a quota ‘proper’ Bulgarian
Jewish nationals who had been demanded by the Nazis and who, as
a consequence were never arrested. Exactly what transpired between
the King of Bulgaria, his prime minister and the Bulgarian Jewish
leadership over this substitution has never been adequately addressed.
In early July 1970 I was given the use of a small room adjacent
to the Synagogue of Athens as a place to work and determine what
in fact might constitute the material heritage of Greek Jewry.
15 hessian sacks were delivered containing the Bulgarian loot and
the contents of these, plus what was delivered from the B’nei Brith ‘Museum’ constituted
the initial collection of what was to evolve into the Jewish Museum
of Greece.
Some 32 years had elapsed since the War and the contents
of the sacks was by no means representative of what they may have
contained initially as was patently obvious from an initial examination.
There were a good number of fragments of the Bulgarian documents
recording some of the material that had been confiscated from the
Jews of Thrace. But there was also a considerable amount of interference
that had occurred after they had been handed over to Greek authorities
and subsequently into the hands of the official centralized Jewish
organization set up after the War. Watches, rings, ear-rings, a
few religious amulets and a quite vast amount of cheap paste jewelry
all datable to the ‘30s represented the sad reminders of the Holocaust
as it had struck ordinary people. There was little to distinguish
this material from that which Greeks, Bulgarians, Jews and Turks
might have worn. The additional material sent from B’Nei Brith
was of greater Jewish interest and central to it were a large number
silver cases some of which contained scrolls of the Book of Esther
(megilloth). All of these appeared to have come from Ioannina and
bore evidence of the close collaboration between local non-Jewish
silversmiths (of which Ioannina was famous) and the Jewish community.
There were as well a number of components of women’s costumes that
were also from Ioannina - in the form of jackets and a full skirted
dress that was said to have come from Preveza. This static amassment
of quite disparate material was hardly going to constitute more
than a topical study, however, it presented a challenge and it
was not long after beginning to document this material that we
set out on a trip to all of the Jewish communities of Greece in
order to assess what may have survived the war in the form of liturgical
art. As Judaeo-Greek religious art had not been studied we had
little recourse but to begin in a vacuum. Prior to this we had ‘discovered’ in
forgotten closets adjacent to the Athens Synagogue and in spaces
under the Ehal of the Romaniote synagogue (also in Athens) that
had been used as a gnizeh (repository for unusable articles and
books of religious significance). a quite considerable number of
books. In one of these we also found a few remnants or discarded
liturgical textiles as well as some ritual art in the form of wooden
finials for Scrolls of the Law and a number of broken and badly
damaged tikkim, (the upright cases that had once contained the
Scrolls of Moses commonly used by Romaniot Jews in Greece).
I
was fortunate by this time to have the assistance of two people
who were to become invaluable in the early growth of what was to
become the Jewish Museum of Greece and who shared with me the arduous
task of tracking down the increasingly enticing evidence of Jewish
life prior to the IInd World War. Ida Mordoh and T.J. DeVinney,
a photographer, both of whom committed themselves to what, at that
time, could well have been a complete waste of time as we had no
idea as to what possibly remained. This first excursion into the
remaining Jewish communities of Greece took us in a circuitous
route from Athens via Halkis to Larissa, Trikala, Volos, Thessaloniki,
from whence we crossed over the Pindus and continued on to Ioannina
and then to Corfu. At this time we did not visit Jewish sites that
had no communities any longer - such as Komotini, Xanthi and Didimoteicho,
Arta, Preveza and Serres. Most of these remaining communities had
been savaged severely by the Nazis after the arrests but we did
discover a surprising number of artifacts as well as books. Perhaps
even more important was that we were put in direct contact with
people who showed interest in what we were doing - viz., photographing,
recording and taking down data as well as assigning somewhat incriminating
ad hoc numbers to artifacts so as to keep track of them in the
future should the need arise. We also began a data book of persons
who we were told had either photographs or even objects that might
be of interest as Judaica.
It was to be in Ioannina that we discovered
that it was possible that a great deal of Jewish material evidence
did in fact remain. A quite extraordinary local Jewish historian,
Joseph Matsah not only took us about the then quite dismal synagogue
but also into what had once been the women’s section on an upper
floor. Here we found a vast number of mildewed books most of which
were bound in leather or half leather bindings and consequently
had attracted rodents and insects over the years. We also found
several wooden tikkim that we were told were from Preveza the community
of which no longer existed and its synagogue apparently had been
disposed of by deed to local civic authorities. At the end of a
day spent in examining the books and rummaging through a large
pile of discarded religious textiles - equally damaged after years
of having lain in humid and vermin infested stacks, we were taken
that afternoon by Joseph Matsah to the Bema, the large reader’s
platform that was built against the west wall of the synagogue
where he unlocked two small doors that were set in its paneled
front. The contents of two cardboard boxes were opened up and we
found over 200 silver ex votos - many of them having inscriptions
in Hebrew indicating the festival or event that they commemorated
including as well names and dates - some of which went back to
the late 18th cent. We were also told that an equal number - if
not more - of similar artifacts had been sent to Israel no long
before. This bore out our increasing suspicion that in fact much
had survived the War and that much had possibly been lost to dealers,
collectors and unscrupulous individuals who had systematically
purloined what remained of the heritage of Greece’s Jews. We later
found two 17th cent. illuminated ketubboth (wedding contracts)
from Corfu hanging in a miserable state in a corner of the mosque-museum
located in the old Muslim quarter of the town. On our return to
Athens we were able to assess what we had found and to then set
out in an organized manner to track down and even to obtain custody
of what was obviously going to be a more complicated and difficult
task than we had envisaged initially.
Not long after this a committee
was established that acted as an interim ‘Board’ of the collection.
This was made up of by Mr Noulis Vital, (the former president of
the Jewish Community of Athens), Elias Almosninos and Moise Constantini.
All three had shown a motivating interest in what we were doing
from the very beginning and out of our initial trip through Greece
we set our sights on an in depth visit to communities. Our first
trip was to Rhodes where Mr Maurice Sorianos was president of a
community that had for all practical purposes ceased to exist.
We returned to Athens after three days with two 18th cent. silver
crowns, two silver breastplates, and a pair of silver finials as
well as what remained of two Scrolls of the Law, both badly burnt
and in a state of near disintegration but obviously of some age.
Both had been rescued’ from a synagogue that had been bombed in
1941 in Rhodes.
Our second trip was to Volos where we made contact
with Serena Mizrahi, a dedicated spinster originally from Larissa
who had been instrumental in rejuvenating the Women’s Zionist Organization
of Greece. Originally from Larissa Ms Mizrahi was the great-grand-daughter
Rabbi Jacob Angel who was the last chief rabbi of Larissa under
the Ottomans. A man of great learning he also steered the community
and that of Trikala through a difficult period of transition. Preserved
in the family were a few mementos that by sheer accident had survived
the War - a large photograph of Angel taken circa 1875 dressed
in a light coloured woolen street garment (binis) and sporting
a fez and turban. In one had he was holding a tesbi or what are
called more usually today ‘worry beads’. In the course of an
afternoon Ms Mizrahi proceeded to open up several cloth wrappers
that contained not only the tesbi that Angel had held in his hand
in the photograph but also some of the wedding undergarments that
had been prepared for him on his marriage in the early 19th cent..
These consisted of hand-woven silk knickers, two long ‘shirts’-
still neatly folded and strangely still held together by the basting
threads - but also a heavily embroidered cloth sash and several
hand-towels also embroidered. Through Miszrahi we were put on the
track of several women originally from either Trikala or Larissa
who were ultimately to give to us what they had never considered
to be important: remnants of a world that had long passed into
oblivion in the form of embroidered hand towels, photographs and
even some household artifacts.
Not long after our return to Athens
I was contacted by an antique dealer in Athens who wanted me to
look at the contents of a large chest that he had acquired from
Salonika. I had heard of the costume of the Jewesses of Salonika
and of its somewhat exotic and distinctive character. There were
even a good number of postcards sporting women wearing the complicated
headdress known as a kofya with heavily seed-pearl embroidered
finials. They more than usually wore decidedly Turkish looking
long kaftans gathered up characteristically from behind. Many wore
fur lined jackets and heavy bracelets and one could make out in
many small star-shaped brilliant set pins in the kofyas or holding
in place long golden chains at the ends of which were small timepieces.
The contents of this chest consisted of several Jewish women’s
kaftans as well as the under skirts - the former made of striped
obviously Turkish silks and the latter more often than not of rich
silk brocades from Lyons. In comparing photographs with objects
that we had from the Bulgarian horde we were able to identify some
of the bracelets, rings and even watches still with their gold
chains as being part of the famous costume of the Jewish women
of Salonika. By 1979 we had managed to assemble all of the components
of this costume save for the kofya, or headdress…though we were
able to identify two of the pearl-embroidered finials that were
had also been part of the Bulgarian horde, some of the watches
and many of the brilliant ornamented pins.
By this date, only
two years after beginning our search, we had opened up not just
a collection that represented a sad memory of what Jewish life
might have been prior to the War but more importantly we had established
the categories that were to become collections - of costumes, photographs,
household textiles but also we began to acquite from communities
discarded liturgical textiles and books. Many of these had survived
only by reason of the fact that they had been discarded even prior
to the War and thus had been left to moulder and rot in storerooms
that had been either ignored or treated indifferently by the Nazis
and later looters. In the course of these trips to communities
we also extended our interest and concern so as to photograph the
synagogues and graveyards in a systematic fashion.
During hours
that were not spent in looking through material of possible interest
to us I also began to collect stories and accounts of life as it
was lived in these communities and the work on the costumes, accounts
and the collecting of recipes resulted in a cookery book that interwove
culinary culture of the Jews in Greece, accounts of local differences
in secular and religious and illustrations many of which were based
on actual costumes or household artifacts that we had found.
During the winter of 1979 - 80 we made a second trip to Ioannina
where Mr Matzas had made arrangements whereby we could photograph,
number and transcribe the ex votos. We also discovered that possibly
an equal number or so had been sent to Israel as a ‘gift’ and though some of them
have turned up at the Israel Museum the majority appear to have
disappeared. They had not been photographed prior to their dispersal.
As the synagogue was in the process of being cleaned and prepared
for some repairs we were again given access to the space in the
women’s section in which had been thrown and enormous number of
books, fragments or complete liturgical textiles all in a quite
miserable state of decomposition but many bearing Hebrew inscriptions
and dedications from the mid 19th cent. but incorporating panels
of 16th - 18th cent. embroideries, or Ottoman brocades some of
which we found dated back to the 16th century. Our work was very
quickly becoming quite complex.
Some of the large hangings were
actually made up from women’s dresses that still bore evidence
their original cut. Discarded in great confusion and state of
dis-repair we acquired several tikkim several of which still had
attatched to them the decorated cloth coverings that were in fair
condition. Most had been heavily over-painted but still bore slight
traces of under-painting that revealed earlier decorations. This
excursion to Ioannina gave us one of the richest collections of
objects that we had thus far found and it was on the basis of this
trip that we made yet another to Verroia - the synagogue of which
along with the entire Jewish Quarter and cemetery had been abandoned
since 1945. The sole remaining Jew in Verroia at that time was
Isaac Cohen who spent an entire day with us as we photographed
the interior and exterior and made a preliminary over-view of the
cemetery that lay somewhat distant from it. The latter was at that
time being used as a playing field as well as pasture ground and
in between a game that was in progress and a several cows in pasturage
we were able to make out the ravaged graves that had been stripped
of their stones and in most cases deeply penetrated by pick axes
and shovels and subsequently left in that condition. The only bright
spot in that day was when we were given permission to take several
ex votos of a type altogether different from what we had found
in Ioannina and were allowed to rummage through some textiles that
had been obviously used to cover the Scrolls of the Law. Verroia
was a Sephardi Community and hence these covers were cut quite
distinctively and had been cut down from women’s kaftans (entari).
A few had dedications in Hebrew embroidered on them and as we went
through them I was given a bundled cloth to clean off the reader’s
desk on which we had them spread to take photographs. It was only
later when I spread open this cloth that I saw that it was not
only large (about 1.50 x 1.50 cms square) but of linen and completely
covered with embroidered buildings, trees, inscriptions in Hebrew
and in one corner a lion with the words in Hebrew ‘ha-Ari’ - ‘the
Lion’ which was the name given to R. Isaac Luria the greatest of
the 16th cent. mystics of Sephat in Israel. It was only later when
we were back in Athens that I was able to work on this textile
which required cleaning and painstaking re-attaching of the stitching.
Something of this genre I had seen in the Israel Museum as well
as the Jewish Museum in New York and at an almost identical one
had been published by Burnett in monumental catalogue that he had
done for the Jewish Museum in London. As it emerged this tablecloth
(which it obviously had been) was one of six surviving examples
of the work of a very strange man, Janver Simcha, active in the
mid-19th cent in Jerusalem, he carved stone Kiddush cups as well
as the lions at the entrance to the Jerusalem police station also
made embroidery ‘kits’ with depictions of the sacred Jewish sites
of Eretz Israel drawn on the raw linen that were sold with bundles
of coloured floss silk to be later used to fill in details by Jewish
housewives at their leisure. The religious itinerary featured on
these linens paralleled the Greek Orthodox custom of Proskynitaria
- or pilgrim maps on which the major sites of Christian religious
significance to be found in the Holy Land were depicted - though
not to my knowledge never on a household artifact such as those
produced by Janver Simha. By this time, i.e. 1980-81 we had begun
to acquire significantly more than the sad remnants of victims
of the War. We were amassing together rich evidence of not only
the folk art of the Jews of Greece but also their interconnection
with other Jewish communities elsewhere. Some very important liturgical
artifacts were acquired such as a set of silver rimonim (finials)
and a yad (a pointer used in reading the Law of Moses) dedicated
in the name of Abraham Galante to the Synagogue of Bodrumm and
dated clearly to 1797. It can only be that these dedications had
been made to the grandfather of the Jewish Turkish historian of
the same name. By this date we had also assembled a good number
of books some dating back to the presses of Salonika in the 17th
cent.. these included volumes of the Talmud as well as commentaries
on the Zohar and several texts by Italian Shabbateans printed in
Mantua. Many of the prayer books, especially those for use on the
holidays (mahzorim) were not only from the famous presses of Salonika
but also presses in Istanbul, Izmir, Mantua, Livorgno, Amsterdam
and Vienna.. One of our most important finds was a very small kabbalist
commentary on the Sepher ha-Yetsira by the ‘HIDA’ which is the
Hebrew name given to R. Hayyim Joseph David Azulai a quite famous
rabbi of Jerusalem (d. 1803) his sanctity was such that even scraps
of paper bearing his name were considered to be effective in making
amulets against the evil eye. As if to make our find more important
this copy of his commentary was the first book printed in Jerusalem
at a Hebrew press by Israel Bak in 1840. Bak was a Hassid who after
having had his press burnt elsewhere re-established himself in
Jerusalem where he opened the first Jewish printing house in 1840.
By 1981 the premises that we had been given adjacent to the sanctuary
of Beth Shalom Synagogue in Athens, had become quite choked with
artifacts that were either in the process of being documented and
photographed but also where possible, exhibited but in no especially
coherent manner. To a degree this was intentional as individual
artifacts - even isolated and in no special context, such as embroidered
sashes or hand-towels, under-garments and fragments of costumes
indicated the range of our interests and also made obvious that
this was not a collection of ‘art’ - but of how people lived.
Inevitably artifacts that had survived the War either in the hands
of Christian neighbors or hidden and ignored suddenly were given
significance and hence the collections began to grow more complicated.
We had also passed the initial danger point (to my mind) that the
collection was going to be dominated by the Shoah and restricted
to the Bulgarian and Nazi atrocities in Greece. Much of the concentration
of the ‘collection’ that we had been given initially from B’Nei
Brith through the efforts of Asher Moshe had been centred on a
few items that inevitably attracted considerable interest that
included a uniform from Auschwitz, several bars of soap that had
been used in the camp and that allegedly were derived form human
fat and documents that had been given to people on their return
from the camps. It would have been quite easy to have determined
that the collections reflect mainly the disaster that had struck
Greek Jewry though this was no longer the main thrust of our endeavours
as we were discovering very quickly that there was material evidence
that reflected the rich social and religious life of Jews prior
to the War. By this date we had begun to bring out a quarterly
Newsletter cut (as was the custom back then) on stencils and then
mimeographed in which we made public current work, field trips
that we were taking as well as work being carried out on the collections
and in every issue a concentrated article on some artifact. The
purpose of this quarterly was to inform the public, either lay
or scholarly of on-going work that was being done, of new artifacts
and more especially to make them public in some systematic manner.
A special column was always reserved for recipes or accounts of
customs and traditions that we were discovering were part of the
Judaeo-Greek heritage. This Quarterly was maintained as one of
the most important of our efforts and was responsible for making
what we were doing much wider known and attracted artifacts from
Greece as well as those that had ‘emigrated’ to the New World (Mexico
included) as well as to Europe. Until 1992 the Newsletter was responsible
for tracking the growth of what was evolving as the Jewish Museum
of Greece.
Inevitably by this time our frequent visits to communities
and their highly acquisitive nature aroused concern as well as
excited ambitions. We had passed the initial stages of trying to
find out what there was that had remained and out of this had grown
collections that were quite autonomous and represented not only
the religious life of Jews in Greece but also their daily life.
As if through the turning of a kaleidoscope the initial flat and
somewhat two dimensional impression given by the sad remnants of
what had managed to survive the War was transformed into multi-coloured
and intriguingly complicated reflection of Jewish life rather than
the destruction of Greece’s Jews.
One of the persons who most drove this home to me was the late
Liza Pinhas. In 1943 she and her entire family (some 20 persons)
was moved from the ghetto to Hirsch Camp in Salonika which was
the last processing stage before being sent to Auschwitz. In order
to maintain some semblance of order in what had become a nightmare
world of disorder, the Nazis maintained up until the very last
moment the impression that the Jews of Salonika were to be re-settled
in a special ‘reserve’ near
Cracow. False money could be bargained for and amongst those who
were perhaps most capable to facing the challenges in life, lay
creative plans for an unknown future. Along with several of her
friends she organized a Salonika Club that they intended to immediately
make the focus of their re-settlement for the purpose of maintaining
their identity and friendships. Liza like many of the youth of
her age married just before leaving in the April of that year and
on arrival almost all of her relatives (including her husband)
were killed and by the January of 1945 when Auschwitz was in the
process of being closed she was moved with most of the women to
a camp in Northern Germany. She became ultimately one of the 1500
odd women found wandering, abandoned by their Nazi guards, in a
forest by the Russians. I was told this story by Liza with a small
cardboard box sitting between us and when she had finished telling
me of how she had taken a local bus from the initial processing
centre that the Russians had set up down to Beglrade and then by
various means to Bucarest where she tried through the Red Cross
to contact a brother who had been living in Istanbul only to be
told that he had commited suicide - a response to news of what
had transpired in the camps. It was after this that she made her
way back to Salonika. In the box between us Liza removed the detritus
of her life as it had been lived between 1943 - 1945. The number
tags on which her IDs were sewn, the bus stub with date that she
had taken initially and then all of the papers from the Russians,
Red Cross and final access papers to re-enter Greece but also a
black chiffon blouse that she had made for herself shortly after
her return on which were embroidered short texts from Sartre, Gide
and even Colette - affirmations of the will to live. Liza’s box
of memorabilia from the horror of those three years was to become
the link between the living and the dead, between what had been
and what survived and was the final statement of return in what
eventually became our exhibit of the Holocaust.
The cramped and quite confusing space in which this work was
being carried out became inoperable after a telephone call one
morning to say that the Synagogue of Patras was to be demolished
the next day. Though small, the synagogue fo Patras was quite elegantly
of a piece as it had been put together by Greek Christian craftsmen
from Corfu in 1912 when the community had been officially re-founded.
We had made an initial overview of this structure only a year before
and thus had a full photographic record of it though we had not
yet managed to make measurements - nor had we extracted more than
a few of its contents that had lain sealed within it for several
years. Already what remained of the community had been legally
dissolved two years before and we had removed two large tikkim
as well as most of the silver ornaments in the form of rimmonim
- all with Venetian control stamps from the early 17th cent.. One
of the tikkim (both at that time had been heavily coated with bronze
paint) proved eventually to have originated from Candia (Herakleion)
in Crete. From other contents in the form of paper amulets (alephot)
and wedding contracts found in the gnizeh (the place where such
documents might be thrown were they to be of no further use) it
was apparent that the ‘new’ Patras Jewish community only re-founded
circa 1912 had been the recipient of artifacts from several Jewish
Communities many of which were now in our collection. The interior
was typically Romaniot with a Bema on the west wall and the Ehal
where the Scrolls of the Law were retained, on its east wall. Both
Bema and Ehal were quite elegantly carved in a neo-classic design
as were its matching benches and the lattice grill that separated
the women’s section.
On the day after the call saying that the synagogue was to be
demolished we arrived with a truck and two workmen as the process
was just beginning and as the demolition was proceeding at the
back of the building we managed to save the entire contents of
its interior by throwing them out of the upper story window onto
the truck- by the evening they resembled nothing more than a pile
of lumber and the synagogue had been reduced to a mound of rubble.
As an ‘artifact’ of considerable importance the interior furnishings of the Synagogue
of Patras finally focused our efforts in an immediate demand that proper space
be found for this and what we had been collecting. By this date the Quarterly
had made our work internationally known and it was obvious as well that other
communities in Greece were seriously thinking of creating ‘Jewish Museums’.
The most significant of them being that of Salonika. Under a highly active and
committed president, Dik Benveniste, his efforts to make a Jewish museum in Salonika
were highly relevant given the size of the community prior to the War. Our own
feeling in Athens was that provincially isolated and weakly defined ‘museums’ were
not what was needed. Our experience had been that only after collecting all of
what remained in one place and then systematically documenting it and extracting
relevance would it be possible to think of local museums.
1983 proved to be the year in which serious decisions had to be
made by persons who had supported us to a degree (and without really
understanding what it was that we were up to) but who also realized
that what we had collected represented a more that ad hoc attention.
It also had become obvious that what we were doing had to be independent
of the Jewish Community of Athens as we had on several occasions
been drawn into community politics. Moreover what we were doing
was seen by many (including Salonika) as representing the Athens
Jewish Community, which it was not. Thus we needed independence
with a legal charter and also space to expand and begin to interpret
what were now collections to the public.
It was later in that year
that decisions were taken by what now constituted a ‘Board’ and
the process of legal incorporation began just prior to the acquisition of a quite
ideal and elegant space on Amalia Ave. in Athens that guaranteed exhibition,
work and storeage areas as well as putting the endeavour very much in the public
eye. From that year until 1993 when it moved to new premises, the Jewish Museum
of Greece had three main functions: 1) to continue to collect, conserve and document
the material evidence of the history of the Jews of Greece 2) To make this collection
relevant to the public in an intelligent and meaningful manner through exhibits
that articulated every aspect of Jewish lfe - and 3) through continued publication
of the Quarterly. It was carefully designed so as to be a highly didactic museum
in the sense that it was directed to teaching the public about the antiquity,
complexity, richness and fate of the Jews of Greece and their inter-action with
non-Jews about them.
Within a year the ‘new' Museum was set up and the opening
was presided over by Rabbi Seurat the Chief Sephardi Rabbi of France. This took
place in a room of the new museum that exactly held all of the interior of the
Synagogue of Patras the acquisition of which had precipitated to a degree the
final decision to create a proper museum worthy of the history of the Jews of
Greece.
By 1993 there was a growing awareness that as the Museum now
had its own charter and was completely independent from the Community
in Athens that it also had to have its own space and it was out
of this awareness that a property was acquired not far from it.
The re-located Museum inevitably has a direction that is decidedly
different from that which is had previously.
Mention should be
made of the newly re-designed Jewish Museum of Salonika. By 1998
the Salonika Jewish Community had two quite large exhibits that
occupied separate spaces over the main synagogue. One exhibit was
of photographs of the rise of the Nazis out of the shambles of
the Weimar Republic down through the Final Solution and ultimate
collapse of Germany brought about by British, US and Russian forces.
Its main thrust was on the growth and ultimate domination of the
Nazis in Europe and focused little on the tragedy that struck Greece
much less the Jews of Salonika. The other exhibit was funded in
memory of Sir Simon Marks and essentially was a copy of the Salonika
Exhibit of Lohemei ha-Getaoth Kibbuits in Israel behind which was
the spirit of the late Miriam Novitch.
In 2001 both of these exhibits
were dismantled and re-designed to provide 1) a running commentary
on the history of the city’s Jews from the 2nd cent. BCE through to the Holocaust. 2) An appropriate
space dedicated to the Holocaust concentrates solely on Salonika and relies on
contemporary photographs, documents and artifacts from the Camps - especially
that of Birkenau-Auschwitz. As initially there were few artifacts the first main
exhibit was of memorabilia collected from Jews of Salonika who had emigrated
to Israel in 1935 and that had been exhibited initially at Bar Ilan University
in the Negev. The main corridor of the entrance to the impressive building that
houses the museum is dominated by tombstones, revetments, fragments and other
stone elements that constitute what remain of the cemetery and now lost synagogues.
*
Mention must be made of two other important sources of information
regarding the material evidence of the Jews of Greece: the synagogues
and the cemeteries. The core concern of initial work was the process
of saving what was most vulnerable to either theft or mal-appropriation
and inevitable decomposition as in the case of of textiles, costumes,
liturgical and household artifacts and books. However, in the course
of visiting communities it was inevitable that local Jewish sites
of feasible importance be encompassed as well.
There were, prior to
the War a great number of synagogues in Greece and the islands.
With the exception of Salonika none of these were of exceptional
size. All are or were of great interest as they reflected the quite
varied threads of Jewish identity that constituted the Jewish presence.
In Salonika names such as Aragon, Mogrebi, Andaluse, Castille,
Italia, Provence were evidence of tenacity to Jewish roots in Iberia
and elsewhere. None of these 33 synagogues and oratories were of
any exceptional antiquity save that of Beth Shalom a considerable
portion of which had survived the great fire of 1917 that consumed
the Jewish Quarter of the city. All of these synagogues had been
savaged by the Nazis or looted by locals with the exception of one,
the Monasteriote, which was given to the Red Cross by the Nazis. The recording
and researching of these defunct and in almost every case, now destroyed buildings
(since 1945) was an aspect of the single minded dedication of the late Albertos
Nar who devoted most of his life to recording the Jewish monuments of the city.
Unfortunately no photographic or architectural study was ever done on these buildings.
Elsewhere in Greece all of the synagogues were photographed between
1979-1990 during visits to communities. Those of Komotini, Kavalla,
Didimoteicho, Serres, Patras, Xanthi Kastoria, Kos and Arta have
since 1985 been destroyed or sold. The medieval synagogues of Hania
and Rhodes and those of Verroia (probably 18th cent.) and Ioannina
(19th cent.) have been renovated in the course of the past six
years.
While many of these buildings were somewhat mean and hardly
pretentious, their sites, relationship with surrounding Jewish
community and non-Christian neighborhoods is highly important for
any study of the demographic peculiarities of Greek towns. Equally
important are their architectural peculiarities. E.g. Komotini’s synagogue had a lantern dome and was of quite large proportions; that
of Hania appears to have been adapted from a ruined and abandoned Venetian church
of the 14th cent., that of Rhodes was certainly influenced by the nearby entrance
hall of the palace of the Knights of St. John (later to become the Knights of
Malta). Without a doubt the Synagogue of Komotini could have been restored as
a building of historical interest if nothing else as 15 years ago, despite having
been used as a stable for horses and sheep since 1944, it was still intact and
its interior columned and remarkably lit by low windows. Sadly its collapse was
apparently welcomed locally though it did reveal a highly textured portion of
the old medieval Comnenid walls of the city.
Fortunately the Synagogues of Verroia,
Rhodes, and Hania have been renovated - especially the latter in
a mindful and significant manner. Despite the fact that only Rhodes
has a Jewish Community, their future (especially that of Hania
as a resource centre on Cretan Jewry) as evidence of the multi-ethnic
and religious life over many centuries in Greece is of great importance.
The Jewish cemeteries continue to occupy a somewhat troublesome
and secondary importance due to halachic (Jewish legal restrictions)
considerations and, to a degree, understandable local non-Jewish
perplexity over their continued presence - especially in the context
of towns where they occupy prominent positions and where there
is no longer a Jewish community. Mention must also be made of the
fact that proper study of Jewish cemeteries is highly expensive,
time consuming, and demands on the part of the person researching
a wide range of expertise in Hebrew, Aramaic epigraphy, local artistic
traditions, culture(s) and customs - both Jewish as well as non-Jewish.
Especially in the case of Greece, Jewish funereal remains in the
form of covered graves indicate even at a cursory glance influences
and obvious migrations of Jews who were absorbed into previously
existing Jewish communities but who, as in the case of the Sicilian Jews in Ioannina,
maintained their own synagogue and had their own area for ‘traditional’ burials
within the Jewish cemetery. Immediately after the War, from 1945 until well into
the ‘80’s, most of the cemeteries in places where Jews had disappeared were in
the process of being pillaged for cut stones. This was especially so where cemeteries
had been bulldozed into oblivion along with their contents such as Hania, Herakleion,
Serres, and of course, the great necropolis of Salonika. Many others, such as
those of Kavalla and Corfu, Kos and to a degree even Ioannina, are in a deplorable
though somewhat stable condition and have walls that insure their relative inviolability.
One notable cemetery is that of Didimoteicho which is essentially
inaccessible as it is spread over the west bank of the Evros river
which is a militarized zone separating Turkey from Greece. Some,
however, such as that of Zakynthos and imminently Kavala and perhaps
even Ioannina are presenting serious problems as towns grow and
encroach upon what for Jews is inviolate funerary territory (a
concept that is not of prime importance to Greek Christians for
whom a burial place is in most cases rented and ‘vacated’ after three years!)
In certain cities of Greece already urban expansion has resulted
in embedding Jewish cemeteries within areas that have been designated
as not only suitable but in many cases vital for any coherent zoning.
Though on a very small scale, the cemetery of Zaknthos, (and Ioannina
for that matter), once outside the city limits, now finds itself
well within them and inevitably local Greek Christian incomprehension
does little to further their preservation or conservation…much
less their future.
No over-all policy has been established to date as to what
should and can be done with these cemeteries many of which contain
important clues regarding Jewish demography, names as well as the
interaction of Jews with local customs and culture. A systematic
study of the cemeteries of Greece is of the prime importance as
these will add important genealogical information, peculiar local
traditions and influences from far a-field that will provide vital
information regarding the complex inner character of communities
and even trade involvements - if not occupations. At present this
entails as well a more sympathetic and concerned approach to this
common Greek patrimony (which it is) on the part of government
ministries especially that of Culture. There has been a somewhat
consistent indifference to Jewish cultural remains in Greece on
the part of the government which may well change due to a quite
different approach to this matter taken by the EU. In collaboration
with local Jewish communities or the Central Board of Jewish Communities
of Greece these sites should be adequately photographed, individual
graves recorded in great detail and further documentation carried
out afterwards.
*
From this cursory examination of the state of
the mute testimony of the surviving material heritage of the Jews
of Greece (and its conservation) it is obvious that the study remains
seminal and it is hoped that what has been saved to date will provide
the inert and silent field of research that it warrants as part
of greater Jewish life in the Diaspora. It is indeed saddening
that the collections of the Jewish Museum of Greece have still
not been adequately documented and that publication of some aspects
of these collections is still awaited. With little doubt the greatest
thrust of interest in Greek Jewry has been dominated by the Holocaust
and unfortunately even this interest was late as it was overshadowed
by concentration on the destruction of east European Jewry. Greece sadly,
and somewhat, as usual, fell between two chairs and has not received and continues
to not receive the concentrated energy of either locals, archaeologists, historians,
ethnographers and even official government agencies that it warrants. |
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