The tragedy of the Holocaust in Greece typically centers around the decimation of the largest prewar Jewish community in Salonika, where over 40,000 of the 42,000 residents were deported to Auschwitz Birkenau by 1943.[1] The story of Rhodes, one of the final remaining Jewish communities in Europe, highlights the changing fate of Jews under different occupation in Greece including Italian, Bulgarian, and German troops.
In a parallel to the final phases of the Holocaust and deportation of the Hungarian Jewry in 1944, in June 1944, Anton Burger arrived to Rhodes and began the deportation of the Jews of Rhodes in July 1944 and detained them in the city center in appalling conditions. Accompanied by their wives and children, the Dodacanese Jews of Rhodes, Kos, and even the sole Jewish man on the island of Leros were deported brutally by sea first to Athens then onward to Auschwitz Birkenau. Only 150 Jews from these deportations survived the war.[2] The deportations of the Jews of Rhodes and the other islands of the Dodacanese are deeply intertwined with the cities and the picturesque tourist locales as homes and businesses were raided by the Germans, and arrests and detention of Jews were within City Hall and other buildings within the central city. The terror and barbarity of the Holocaust in Rhodes was pervasive across the island and extended to the sea where people who died in transit were tossed overboard in transit to Athens.
The Greek Island of Rhodes had one of the oldest Jewish communities in Europe, mentioned in the Book of Maccabees dating back to the 2nd century BC and by the historian Josephus in the first century AD. The “Juderia” Jewish quarter is resplendent with Jewish symbols along the narrow medieval alleys where the surviving synagogue “Kahal Shalom” still stands as an active articulation of Jewish culture and religion and a living memorial to the Holocaust. The pre-war community was highly educated, and Rhodes became a significant hub for Sephardic education and commerce with merchants, craftsmen, bookbinders, and weavers.[3] In addition to thriving Ladino culture, a French language school was opened in 1888 under the auspices of the Alliance Israelite Universelle funded by Edmond Rothschild.
As a result of being a significant Sephardic center in Europe, musical life richly accompanied literary and philosophical traditions. The “Romances” tradition was particularly notable in Rhodes, songs imbued with religious lessons, moral values, life events, human emotions, and narrative stories of great monarchs and individuals. These songs also filtered into daily life where women also sung them within the home and at special occasions the songs were accompanied by musical instruments. These songs also preserved the unique “Yevanik” language – a dialect of Greek blending Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. However, this dialect along with the rich oral history of songs was mostly lost to the Holocaust, and today Romaniote Jews speak modern Greek.
