Once an epicenter of Jewish culture and one of the only cities in Europe where Jews were the majority, reveals illuminating fragments of that tragically lost world.

By Motti Verses

October 7 is a dreadful date for Israel, as we mourn the Hamas atrocities of three years ago – but this date also carries profound meaning in another chapter of Jewish history. The story of the Jews of Thessaloniki, Greece.

Eighty-two years ago, on October 7, Jewish prisoners forced to work at the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau rose up against the Nazis. Among them was a significant group of Greek Jews, many from Thessaloniki, whose ancient and vibrant Jewish community had already been almost completely destroyed in the Holocaust.

Knowing that they, too, were marked for death, the prisoners attacked their SS guards and set one of the camp’s crematoria on fire. Around 450 prisoners were killed during the revolt or executed afterward. Testimonies recall Greek Jewish prisoners fighting until the end, some singing Greek partisan songs and the Greek national anthem before their deaths. An act of bravery and heroism.

The tragedy of Thessaloniki’s Jews would echo decades later in Israeli culture through singer Yehuda Poliker, the son of Holocaust survivors, from the city. His music has returned again and again to the memory of Thessaloniki and to the scars carried by survivors and their children, helping keep the story of this once-thriving Jewish community alive for new generations.

Poliker’s music was on my mind during my late-summer visit to northern Greece, inspiring me to walk through the traces of the world from which many of those men came. Poliker sings painfully:

 “One more border, an eternity of time. Wait for me, Thessaloniki. The road to Greece is long. The heart wandered, the blood froze. In the snows of Germany. Everyone, everyone I loved was lost there, In a camp in Poland.”

My guide was the knowledgeable Alena Dotsoulas of ‘Thessaloniki IL’, who is partly Israeli. She has lived in Thessaloniki for the past 14 years and leads Israeli groups on walking tours through the city. Over four deeply moving hours, we walked through a place where Jewish history is not confined to a museum. It lies beneath your feet, behind market façades, inside an Ottoman bathhouse and a surviving synagogue, and in small brass stones embedded in the pavement.

To understand the tragedy, you first have to understand what existed before it.

Jewish life in Thessaloniki stretches back more than two millennia, but its transformation came after 1492, when Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain, found refuge in the Ottoman Empire. Thousands settled here, bringing their language, Ladino, along with their trades, traditions and commercial networks. They helped transform Ottoman Thessaloniki into one of the Mediterranean’s great commercial centers. At different periods, Jews formed a major part – and at times the largest population group – of this extraordinary multicultural city of Jews, Muslims and Christians. It was even called  “Jerusalem of the Balkans” in the 19th and early 20th centuries by European travelers, diplomats, historians, and non-Jewish observers.

That lost world still reveals itself as I walk.

Near the commercial heart of the city stands Yahudi Hamam, the Jewish Bath, a remarkable Ottoman bathhouse dating from around the turn of the 16th century. Its name came from the Jewish neighborhood that once surrounded it.

A few steps away, the story continues at Agora Modiano, the great covered market bearing the name of Eli Modiano, the Jewish architect who designed it. Today it feels unmistakably contemporary, its historic structure filled with food stalls, cafés, delicatessens and vendors selling fish, meat, bread, wine and Greek products. Yet beneath this polished new chapter lies another layer of Jewish history: before the market was built, the site had been associated with the Talmud Torah complex of Thessaloniki’s Sephardic community.

At Thessaloniki’s port, I look down. Small brass plaques embedded in the ground carry names. They are Stolpersteine (“stumbling stones”), part of the European memorial project that restores individual identities to victims of Nazi persecution. Five stones at the port, commemorate Jewish dockworkers who worked here before being deported and murdered at Auschwitz: Ezra Pitson, Avraam Souhami, Eliaou Katan-Maïr, Moise Molho and Haim Bensoussan.

Five names. Five workers. Five individual lives from a community that can otherwise become an overwhelming statistic. Perhaps that is what makes these tiny memorials so affecting: you have to lower your eyes to read them.

The Monastirioton Synagogue offers something increasingly rare in Thessaloniki: a tangible survivor. Completed in 1927 with support from Jewish families originating in Monastir (today Bitola in North Macedonia) the synagogue survived the Nazi occupation largely because it was used by the Red Cross as a warehouse. After liberation, the handful of Jews who had survived in hiding or through participation in the resistance gathered here to begin rebuilding communal life.

Standing outside with the police officers guarding the building, we find that entrance is impossible even on a Saturday, the day of our tour. “Since Covid, entrance has been restricted for reasons that remain unclear,” Alena says, before revealing numbers that are difficult to comprehend.

“Before the war, Thessaloniki was home to approximately 50,000 Jews. Between March and August 1943, the Germans deported more than 45,000 of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau, most of whom were murdered in the gas chambers shortly after arrival,” she tells us.

Here the story reaches one of its most uncomfortable chapters.

Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Koretz, Thessaloniki’s chief rabbi, also headed the Jewish communal administration under German control, and his role remains bitterly debated. Koretz relayed German orders to the community and encouraged compliance. Critics, including survivors and historians, have argued that his leadership helped the Nazis carry out the deportations with less resistance and that he failed to understand what awaited the deportees in Poland. Historians continue to debate his judgment, the constraints under which he operated and the extent of his responsibility.

What is not in dispute is where responsibility for the destruction itself lies: with Nazi Germany and the machinery that systematically concentrated, deported and murdered Thessaloniki’s Jews. Within months, one of Europe’s most remarkable Jewish cities had effectively ceased to exist.

Eventually, my walk reaches Eleftherias Square (Liberty Square). Itself the scene of a terrible chapter in the persecution. In July 1942, thousands of Jewish men were ordered to assemble here for registration for forced labor and were publicly humiliated and abused by the German occupiers.

Today, Thessaloniki’s Holocaust Memorial commemorates the community that was almost entirely destroyed. Its haunting sculptural composition intertwines a seven-branched menorah, flames and human bodies, transforming the memory of tens of thousands of murdered Jews into one of the most powerful stops on this walk.

After four hours, the Jewish story of Thessaloniki no longer feels like a separate chapter of the city’s history.

It is the city’s history.

And soon, that story will have a major new home. In western Thessaloniki, beside the old railway station from which the deportation trains departed, construction is underway on the Holocaust Museum of Greece. The symbolism of the location is impossible to miss. The trains that carried Thessaloniki’s Jews toward Auschwitz left from this area; now, on the same ground, a national institution devoted to remembrance, education and research is taking shape, planned for opening during 2028.

The museum is intended to become a major new landmark, preserving not only the story of Thessaloniki’s Jews but also the memory of Jewish communities across Greece devastated during the Holocaust.

At the Grand Hotel Palace, an elegant five-star Thessaloniki landmark whose imposing neoclassical façade evokes the grandeur of a European palace, where we stayed, I met Natasa Papanagiotou, a senior hotel director. She is strikingly aware of the city’s tragic Jewish history. In fact, she is the one who drew my attention for the first time to the museum project, only a short distance from the historic railway area.

“Our location will become increasingly important with the museum nearby, and we are all aware of the growing number of visitors from Israel, especially groups, to our city,” she says. “Israelis are the number one foreign visitors here; only the domestic Greek market is stronger.”

It is a fitting place to end this journey. For centuries, Thessaloniki was home to one of the great Jewish communities. Yet its traces still remain. In buildings and markets, in synagogues and memorials, in five small brass stones at the port, in the music of Yehuda Poliker and, soon, in a museum.

The horrific story of the Jews of Thessaloniki will continue to be told, back to the city to discover a story that belongs not only to Jewish history, but to Thessaloniki itself.

About the writer:

The author, Motti Verses is a seasoned hotel expert, traveler, writer, and videographer, and formerly served as Head of Public Relations for Hilton Hotels & Resorts in Israel. Today, as a travel writer and hospitality trends analyst, his insights and experiences are regularly featured in leading Israeli media outlets.

*Feature photo: The writer Holocaust Memorial, Thessaloniki

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).