The building of Etz Hayyim dates to the 14th-15th centuries and was originally a Venetian Catholic church, dedicated to St. Katherine, located in the heart of the small, centuries-old Jewish neighbourhood of Chania, known as Evraiki. The church was damaged in the 1540s during one of the Ottoman Turkish attacks on the city where the building was left without a roof. In the mid-to late 17th century, after the eventual Ottoman conquest of Crete (1669), the building was acquired by Hania’s Jewish community who then converted it into a synagogue.
Prior to World War II, Kal Kadosh Etz Hayyim, a Romaniote synagogue, together with Beth Shalom (bombed in 1941), a Sephardic synagogue, served the needs of Hania’s Jewish community. Once this community was deported in 1944, Etz Hayyim was looted and desecrated and then occupied by squatters until the mid-1950s. From that time until the mid-1990s, the derelict synagogue served as a repository of neighbourhood rubbish, and invariably as a chicken pen, dog kennel and storeroom.
Having stood abandoned for almost 50 years following the end of the Second World War, the fortunes of Etz Hayyim were about to change as a result of the intervention by Hania resident, Nikos Stavroulakis (himself an artist, writer, academic and founding director of the Jewish Museums of of Athens and Thessaloniki) who wanted to rebuild and revive the synagogue after surveying extensive earthquake damage caused to the building in 1995. Soon afterwards, Nikos gave a lecture about Etz Hayyim at a symposium jointly sponsored by the World Monuments Fund and the Jewish Heritage Program in New York. As a result, Etz Hayyim was added to the prestigious list of the world’s “100 Most Endangered Sites” of international cultural concern compiled by the World Monuments Fund in 1996. With this recognition, Nikos acquired the funding to fully restore the synagogue, a process which took three years and was headed by Nikos himself under the aegis of the World Monuments Fund in cooperation with the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece (KISE).
The synagogue was officially rededicated on 10 October, 1999 with approximately 350 people in attendance, including members of the various Greek Jewish communities, representatives from the Orthodox and Catholic churches in Hania and local and international dignitaries such as Constantine Mitsotakis, the former Prime Minister of Greece, alongside the German Ambassador to Greece.
Since 2010, Etz Hayyim has been operated by a non-profit organisation in cooperation with the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece (KISE). This non-profit organisation is registered as a charity in Greece and, because Etz Hayyim does not receive any public funding, it raises funds for the maintenance of the synagogue and for the various religious and cultural events to ensure its long-term preservation. Its team of staff and volunteers undertake ongoing research into the history of Cretan Jews at the same time as engaging both local and international school groups and teachers as part of the synagogue’s educational outreach program.