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by Minna Rozen
This paper engages with the involvement of Jewish Diaspora organizations, and the ramifications of their role with regard to both the rebuilding plan of the burnt zone created by the big fire that devastated Salonika in August 1917 , and the rehabilitation of those left homeless by the fire. This study sheds further light on the subject, yielding a fascinating portrait of a broader issue, namely, the response of diasporas in general when one of their communities is in distress. Accordingly, this paper can serve as a case study of the motivations and actions of diasporas in such situations: At what point do they become involved on behalf of their injured kin? How far do they take this involvement? And does such intervention always prove worthwhile?
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The paper analyzes the process of the Jewish community of Salonika's passage from the Ottoman into the Greek period through its organizational patterns and its internal and external politics. Using a variety of primary sources, many of them newly unearthed, are revealed here the continuity and changes in the community's political culture as it was forced to leave the Imperial - multinational framework and adjust to the world of a Nation-State. The community's political and economic decline that followed its integration in the Greek state and the influence these developments had on the social fabric is portrayed through the communal organization.
2018, Αρχείων Ανάλεκτα:Περιοδική έκδοση μελέτης και έρευνας αρχείων
The present essay explores the education of Jewish children and youth in Salonika from the transitional period of the Young Turk Revolution (1908) and the amalgamation of Ottoman Salonika into the Greek State until the German invasion of Greece (1941. Based on a variety of primary sources, archival material mostly unused hitherto, in Hebrew, Ladino, Greek, and French gathered in Greece, Russia, Israel, the U.S., and France as well as periodicals and memoirs, the essay makes use of the Jewish-Salonikan experience to consider a broader question: the ramifications of such a transition from the multinational empire to the nation-state, for the educational politics of minorities: How much will a minority be willing to invest in order to entrench its identity through education? What motivates its leadership to invest in such education? To what degree does such education serve the minority’s political standing? Finally, the essay addresses the universal question of how much a society is ready to invest in egalitarian education.
2005, Jewish Social Studies
2005, Jewish social studies
2018, ÉTUDES BALKANIQUES
Scholars have relied upon diverse methodologies and sources to produce a new corpus of studies about Salonica’s Jews that explores the impact of the end of the Ottoman Empire and the consolidation of the Greek nation-state. Much of the newer scholarship, however, reinforces the perception that Salonica’s Jews experienced a period of “decline” after the city’s incorporation into the Greek state (1912 – 1913) that culminated in their deportation to Auschwitz (1943). This study investigates why such a lachrymose and teleological interpretation of Salonican Jewish history persists today. By reference to new sources and a different interpretive lens, this article also challenges conventional wisdom concerning key turning points in the narrative of the city’s Jews: a major fire (1917), a compulsory Sunday closing law (1924), and the first major act of anti-Jewish violence (1931). The article thus offers a new approach to assessing the encounters between the multiplicities of Jews in Salonica and the Greek state.
2007, American Jewish History
2009, Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora
[Attention: The attachments contain correct download links to the accompanying presentation in both pptx and ppsx (presentation & show)] in English and Greek [Ελληνικά] ___________________________________ Jewish Thessaloniki is unique because the most cataclysmic and momentous event in its 2,000 year history is its (near total) obliteration. Unfathomable events of human annihilation took place within a space of a few months in 1943 CE. These events have been only superficially researched as to the interplay of circumstances and powers that allowed them to take place, to the degree and speed they occurred. Documentary evidence shows the bureaucratic efficiency of the perpetrators. The events of the Holocaust of the Jews of Thessaloniki should be correlated with the history of the Community before AND after the destruction. The question is twofold: if more human beings could have been saved and, irrespective of the outcome, what was the moral standing of the surroundings of the Community? The latter, for objective purposes, can only be surmised and deduced by the behavior, attitude, actions, reactions and / or omissions of the non–Jewish community, as a whole and as individuals, BEFORE and AFTER the Holocaust. Unfortunately the general Holocaust mathematical equation has two parts: The first equality states that it only takes a few evil persons to assassinate [too] many. The second equality states that many righteous humans may save, at most, a finite number of fellow beings. Darfur waits our actions. . .
The History of the Jews of Salonika and the Holocaust: An Exposé
[Attention: The attachments contain correct download links to the accompanying presentation in both pptx and ppsx (presentation & show)] ___________________________________ Jewish Salonika is unique: the most cataclysmic and momentous event in its two thousand year history is its near total obliteration. The year 1943 CE witnessed unfathomable events of human annihilation that took place within the time frame of just a few months. These events have been only superficially researched. Such superficiality is exemplified in the research on the interplay of circumstances and powers that allowed them to take place and the degree and speed to which they occurred. At odds with such feeble research is the existence of documentary evidence demonstrating the bureaucratic efficiency of the perpetrators. Given such documentary evidence, the events of the Holocaust of the Jews of Salonika should be correlated with the history of the Community before and after the destruction. Proceeding in this manner should be done in keeping with the framework of concurrent Hellenic history in particular and European–world history in general. The inquiry partially catalyzing such a correlation is twofold: first, could more human beings have been saved and second, irrespective of the outcome, what was the moral standing of the Society at large? The latter, for objective purposes, can only be deduced by the behavior, attitude, actions, reactions and/or omissions of the non-Jewish community as a whole and as individuals before and after the Holocaust. Deducing as such must occur with cognizance. Mainly, there is difficulty in judging the behavior of bystanders when it is impossible to ascertain how the critic would have behaved under similar circumstances. Mindful of possible ambiguity, the general Holocaust calculus nevertheless has two parts: the first operation states that it takes only a few evil persons to assassinate many. The second operation states that many righteous humans may save, at most, a finite number of fellow beings. Informed by such evidence and caveats, my objective is to present a glimpse of Jewish Thessaloniki with special emphasis to the Holocaust. This vast topic may be broadly divided into the following subtopics: 1) The history of Jewish Thessaloniki up to the Holocaust, 2) The Holocaust of the Jews of Thessaloniki and 3) The post war aftermath encompassing the current status and future of Jewish Thessaloniki in general and the preservation of the remnants of Sephardic heritage and traditions. The goal to which I aspire is to provide a sequence of historical events and by so doing, to attempt to stimulate interest in further research. A cursory non-web or web based search lays bare both the surprising little we know, as well as the fact that scholarly or non-scholarly published work, in most instances, employs the repetition of a bare minimum of facts and data. Informed by such a reality, one might be tempted to believe that a particular subject especially that of the annihilation is taboo. Gaps in the historiography of Greece do a disservice both to the remaining Jewish Greeks in particular and the whole Hellenic nation in general. It is encouraging that research has recently accelerated, albeit at a slow pace. These endeavors are nevertheless a welcome step in the right direction. The main reason that research should accelerate at full speed is the inescapable reality of the biological attrition of the ranks of eyewitnesses and Holocaust survivors.3
2014, Jewish History
Current historiography approaches the passage of Salonican Jewry from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek nation-state from a macroscopic perspective. Concentrating on state-minority relations, it focuses exclusively on external forces, treating Salonican Jews as a homogenized community and ignoring the role of the city’s non-Jews. To reassess the importance of the local dynamic, this article examines processes within Salonica itself. Through a close reading of a debate over the city’s commercial future, it considers the shifts in Greco-Jewish relations and the swift reversal of ethnic hierarchies within the city’s entrepreneurial elite that took place at a time when Greek government circles still included the Jews in their vision of a commercially prosperous Greek Salonica. In 1913–14, the Salonican Chamber of Commerce’s proposal to establish a free port generated a heated discussion that transcended the boundaries of professional deliberations and entered the local public sphere. The Greek New Club, an organization whose members were drawn from Salonica’s still small and economically weak Greek entrepreneurial class, became heavily involved in the debate, broadening the field of entrepreneurial politics, marginalizing the existing multiethnic Ottoman commercial institutions, and ultimately elevating itself as the rightful representative of a class and a city’s broader interests. At the same time, the Greek press identified the proposal’s advocates as Jewish businessmen and discursively constructed them as un-Greek. Before the aggressive policies of a nationalizing state led to the complete marginalization of Salonica’s Jews during the interwar period, this historically particular local interplay of class and ethnicity was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the de-Judaization of the city.
2006
Although Sephardim and Ashkenazim are often considered to be two distinct Jewish groups that rarely intersected, a close look at the case of Salonica (Thessaloniki), a port city in present-day northern Greece, reveals the permeability and mobility among Jewish communities over the generations. Although often imagined as the capital of the Sephardi Jewish world, Salonica became home not only to Jews expelled from Spain but also to those from Portugal, Italy, and elsewhere prior to and after 1492. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, industrialization, urbanization, and major polit- ical upheavals such as the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire propelled Jews from the region and beyond to seek refuge in Salonica. During this period of transition, some Jews from the Balkan town of Monastir, Greek-speaking Romaniote Jews from Thessaly, and Ashkenazi Jews from eastern and central Europe played key roles in Salonican Jewish society, whereas others experienced marginalization.
The unexpected revitalization of Polish Jewish traditionalism—Hasidic and non-Hasidic—is particularly visible in the realm of education. During the interwar period, a combined influx of pious refugees from the Soviet Union and American Jewish funds bolstered traditionalist Jewish elementary schools and yeshivot. At the same time, traditionalists reformed those institutions in response to emergent secularist Jewish movements. Polish Jewish traditionalism was subtly transformed in the process, presenting a striking contrast with other more rigid “ultra-orthodox” Hungarian counterparts, while offering a viable alternative to secularist Jewish subcultures within Poland. This article highlights the surprising adaptability of Poland’s traditionalist Jewish communities during a period usually conceived as one of secularist Jewish growth and traditionalist decline.
2010
This study dealt with some aspects of the damages done by the great fire of 1917 in Thessaloniki. It also documented unpublished photographs, taken by the French Army in Thessaloniki just after the fire. The late Professor Charalambos Papastathis was the possesor of this material since 1958. We publish the photographs for the first time in 2001, in the series Thessalonikeon Polis. This book comprises of revised and some new papers and a better method to comment photographs.
For the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century with its still wide swathes of territory stretching from the Balkans to the Persian Gulf and its seemingly endless procession of confessional, ethnic and linguistic groups, the innovation of states based on national identity represented a mortal threat, as indeed, it did to other imperial structures of similarly diverse composition. None of the major empires, the Romanov, the Hapsburg and the Ottoman, would survive the early decades of the twentieth century. What set the Ottoman case apart from the others was the direct involvement of the Western powers in the process of imperial dismemberment. When even its erstwhile allies began to help themselves to portions of Ottoman territory whose integrity they had recently promised to protect—the French seized Tunisia in 1881 and the British helped themselves to Egypt the following year—it was clear that the external environment was turning increasingly hostile to the empire’s existence.
2014, Yad Vashem Studies, Vol. 42[1]
The volume Bystanders, Rescuers or Perpetrators? The Neutral Countries and the Shoah offers a trans-national, comparative perspective on the varied reactions of the neutral countries to the Nazi persecution and murder of the European Jews. It examines the often ambivalent policies of these states towards Jewish refugees as well as towards their own Jewish nationals living in German-occupied countries. By breaking down persistent myths, this volume contributes to a more nuanced understanding of an under-researched chapter of Holocaust history and also considers the challenges and opportunities related to Holocaust education and remembrance in the neutral countries. "Bystanders, Rescuers or Perpetrators? The Neutral Countries and the Shoah" is the second volume in the IHRA publication series and offers a trans-national, comparative perspective on the varied reactions of the neutral countries to the Nazi persecution and murder of the European Jews. It examines the often ambivalent policies of these states towards Jewish refugees as well as towards their own Jewish nationals living in German-occupied countries. By breaking down persistent myths, this volume contributes to a more nuanced understanding of an under-researched chapter of Holocaust history and also considers the challenges and opportunities related to Holocaust education and remembrance in the neutral countries. The volume is based on the conference papers of the international conference of the same name which was held in November 2014. The conference was originally funded through IHRA's Grant Programme and received the ‘Yehuda-Bauer Grant’ because of its particular emphasis on the multilateral aspect.
2016, in. C. Guttstadt, T. Lutz, B.Rother, Y. San Román (ed) Bystanders, Rescuers or Perpetrators? TThe Neutral Countries and The Shoah, Metropol Verlag & IHRA ed. Berlin 2016,
My article (pp.290-300) deals with Holocaust memory, its distortion and the meaning of its commemoration in Turkey. The entire book is about a trans-national, comparative perspective on the varied reactions of the neutral countries to the Nazi persecution and murder of the European Jews. It examines the often ambivalent policies of these states towards Jewish refugees as well as towards their own Jewish nationals living in German-occupied countries. By breaking down persistent myths, this volume contributes to a more nuanced understanding of an under-researched chapter of Holocaust history and also considers the challenges and opportunities related to Holocaust education and remembrance in the neutral countries.
2018
A number of studies have approached violence against civilians during the Balkan Wars as a traditional example of ethnic cleansing. Although ethnic cleansing was present during these conflicts, it presented some distinctive characteristics. The shifting of boundaries between what was considered criminal behaviour provided an opportunity for a variety of groups to apply violence for several reasons. Thus, the investigation of the role of combatants and their incentives for committing violent acts should be conducted in conjunction with the agency of the local people. As argued in this article, the main reason for the extended level of violence against civilians was the combination of two historical occurrences. These were the brutalization from the experience of combat and the recent historical background of Rumeli.
2010, University Press of Maryland
A study on multigenerational Sephardic Jewish women's names in Salonica. In this article, I draw a picture of the changing naming patterns beginning in the Iberian Peninsula- Spanish and Portuguese names, Biblical names, the effect of the modern times, and the influence of the Alliance school (French names).
The History of Thessaloniki Chamber of Commerce and Industry 1914-2014 along with the city's history during those 100 years.
2014
The ‘Focus’ section of this edition of ‘Quest’ is composed of very diverse contributions, authored by both junior and senior scholars. The articles cover a wide range of topics, time periods and geographical areas. We open with the Greek Islands, considered from very different points of view: Cristina Pallini and Annalisa Scaccabarozzi offer us a study of urban history, analyzing Salonika’s lost synagogues, while Varvaritis presents the ‘Cronaca Israelitica’ – the first Jewish newspaper in the Ionian Islands – and the discussions of Jewish emancipation in the late XIXth century. Then we move on to Finland, with a contribution by Tarja Liisa Luukkanen that presents the 1897 discussion concerning the legal condition of the Jews that took place within the Finnish Diet, and in particular within the clergy, illustrating the role of antisemitism and the reception of Adolf Stoecker’s ideology. From the Baltic Sea we move back to Southern Europe, with an essay by Bojan Mitrović dedicated to the forms of social integration and of nationalization of Serbian Jewry as seen through a peculiar case study. Udi Manor’s article makes us leap to the North American continent, and to Jewish New York in particular, discussing Jewish 'identity politics' through the prism of the “Jewish Daily Forward” in the early XXth century. The last three articles concentrate on the second half of the XXth century. Rolf Steininger presents the figure of Karl Hartl, the first Austrian diplomat in Israel, and his perception of the country. Michele Sarfatti carefully reconstructs how foreign (non-Italian) historiography interpreted Fascist antisemitism between 1946 and 1986. Finally, the ‘Focus’ section is closed by Anna Baldini’s attentive depiction of Primo Levi’s role in shaping Italy’s memory of the Shoah.
In the town of Akhisar, a Western Anatolian town, there lie some tombstones with inscriptions in Hebrew on them. It is clear that the place was once a Jewish cemetery. The place no longer looks like a cemetery for it is not only surrounded with buildings, but the land is ploughed for cultivation. Lately the cemetery had been taken into an enclosure and the tombstones have been aligned at certain intervals and the field has been patched with grass. The tombs can no longer be identified. There are twenty-six tombstones lying on the ground here and there. The number of tombstones is not enough so as to claim whether more than one person is buried in one tomb or to draw out family ties. In any case I observed that the field is big enough to encompass twenty-six tombstones. They all belong to the Ottoman period dating from 1884 to 1918. Today there is no longer a Jewish community in this town. The Jews in almost none of the Anatolian towns have been in majority and therefore it is difficult to say whether they ever had a lack of space for burial ground. In this paper I will compare these Jewish tombstones at Akhisar with a number of Ottoman tombstones, particularly the ones in Western Anatolia. I will also try to establish through archival documents and some other sources the historical background to the Jewish community that once existed in this small town of Anatolia.
Urbanism Imported or Expported?
The paper discusses the reaction of the religious communities of Thessaloniki to the Greek government' s proposal for a total redesign of the city, after the fire of 1917 that destroyed the city-intra-muros. The plan was signed by French planner Ernest Hebrard.
2018
As the First World War broke out in 1914, American Jews seemed far away from the upheaval in Europe. Yet their role as neutral spectators from the distance was questioned right from the outset because of their diverse transcultural entanglements with Europe. Seen from a specific Jewish perspective, the war bore the potential of becoming a fratricidal war. In particular at the Eastern front it was a likely scenario that Jewish soldiers fighting on either side would have to face each other in battle. For Jews, depending on how one defined Jewishness, could be regarded as citizens of a particular nation-state or multi-ethnic empire, as members of a transnational religious community or as members of an ethnic-national diaspora community. Against this background, this article attempts to shed fresh light on the still under-researched topic of American Jewish responses to the outbreak of the First World War. Although American Jewry in 1914 was made up of Jews with different socio-cultural backgrounds, they were often regarded as being pro-German. The war’s impact and the pressures of conformity associated with these contested loyalties for American Jews did therefore not just unfold in and after 1917, but, as this article emphasizes, already in 1914.
1999, Justice, 33. Justice, Spring 1999,pp. 35-37.
From its beginnings, Greece was founded and based on the principle and constitutional dictate of full emancipation and freedom of Religion for all its citizens. Greece was attacked by Italy in 1940 and beat her in the field. The German Reich invaded and occupied all of Greece on April 1941. The country was divided in 3 occupation zones: German, Italian (up to September 1943) and Bulgarian. The Quisling governments supported the Jewish Greek citizens, albeit with no success. The Church supported fully the Jews. Also many were saved by joining the Resistance in the mountains. The overwhelming majority of the non-Jewish population was sympathetic to the plight. The Holocaust proceeded differently in various localities and not simultaneously. In smaller cities-communities full integration of the Jews into them coupled also with historical tolerance was instrumental in rescue.
genocidepreventionnow.org
Jews in the Balkans: History, Religion, Culture, Split, Croatia, May 8-10 2017.
This paper is the result of the cooperation between Zrinka Podhraški Čizmek, who researches Croatian maritime documents from the 18th century and Naida-Mihal Brandl, who specializes Jewish history. Based on the analysis of 16.000 maritime documents of the Hrvatski pomorski regesti – Osamnaesto stoljeće / Regesti Marittimi Croati – Settecento, Nikola Čolak, Padova 1985 and 1993 (12.000 published and 4.000 still unpublished), we identified very interesting networks of maritime trade involving Jewish merchants, agents, owners of goods and ships in the Adriatic within the Mediterranean context. The result of research on the documents from different collections of the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Archivio di Stato di Ancona and Archivio di Stato di Fano are over 500 “bills of lading” where Jews were the main factor. From these documents, it is possible to map not only the routes of different merchandise, but to analyze all the types of goods and their provenance, especially from the hinterland. This research shows a picture of connections between the Republic of Venice, the Austrian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Dubrovnik, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the Papal State, the Kingdom of Naples, and many others. Through these documents, it’s possible to achieve a completely new knowledge not only about the goods from the Americas that were imported through London, Amsterdam, Livorno, Ancona, Venice to the Eastern Adriatic coast, but also the export from the East through the Ottoman Empire (Levant and the Balkans), Dalmatian cities toward other European centers. These commercial connections were very intensive bringing not only wealth in goods, but also impulses from different cultures, religions and beliefs in the creation of one communio through the Sea without frontiers where differences didn't necessarily disappeared – rather they were were welcomed. Surprisingly, we found old Jewish family names in new areas, and in new contexts: the Coen and Morpurgo, Jacur, Vitali, Baraffael, Consolo, Amadio, Baroni, Uziel, Bemporad, Cagli, Mondolfo, Sonino, Vivante, and many others, which give us a real picture of the daily life of these families in so many different contexts. They were merchants, agents, captains, owners and parcenevoli, who brought their inventiveness and skills, spiritual life and religion, working and family Ethics, giving a particular coloring to the Adriatic and the Mediterranean world of the Eighteenth century.
2009, East European Jewish Affairs
2019, R. Benveniste - P. Hantzaroula (eds), Jewish Life after the Return: Dutch and Greek Experiences after the Shoah, "Historein", [S.l.], v. 18, n. 2, June
After the end of the Second World War, and as a result of the ensuing Greek Civil War (1946–1949), former resistance members went through a period of generalised, severe persecution. In this context, Jews who had survived the Shoah by taking part in the resistance in some way or by going into hiding under the protection of the resistance forces had to denounce their former comrades or communist rescuers. How did Greek Jews who had been influenced by leftist ideology respond to the politics of the civil war and its aftermath? How were their responses affected by the attitudes of the Greek state, Jewish community and State of Israel towards them? Following the traces left mainly in a) the archives of the Jewish Museum of Greece, the Jewish communities of Athens and Salonica, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee; b) the Greek Jewish press of the period; c) personal accounts, essays and literature, I will attempt to explore the multiplicity of responses of leftist Greek Jews to the political and personal dilemmas of the post-Shoah period. I argue that despite different postwar (and prewar) political attitudes and experiences, leftist Greek Jews expressed two main tendencies: a tight relationship with the country’s Jewish communities and, at the same time, a strong tendency to leave for other countries, mainly Israel.