Jewish Thessaloniki

For roughly 450 years Thessaloniki was a city where the language of the port was Ladino, the shops closed on Saturday, and the Jewish community was not a minority but the largest part of the population. It was called the "Jerusalem of the Balkans". Fewer than 2,000 Jews live in the city today.

This page is not a sightseeing route. It is a map of an absence, and of the few places where you can still meet it.

How they came

After the expulsion from Spain in 1492, thousands of Sephardic Jews found refuge in Ottoman Thessaloniki. They brought their language, their printing presses and their trades. Within decades the community was the city's largest, and it stayed that way for centuries.

By the early twentieth century the city had dozens of synagogues, Jewish schools, newspapers, a hospital, and one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe.

Two ruptures

The fire of 1917 levelled the centre and left more than 70,000 people homeless, of whom roughly 52,000 were Jews. The rebuilding did not allow a return to the quarter as it had been, and the community was scattered across new settlements.

The old Jewish cemetery, with graves going back centuries, was destroyed in 1942. The campus of the Aristotle University stands on the site today.

1943

On 15 March 1943 the first train left the old railway station. By early June, 48,974 people had been deported, most of them from Thessaloniki, to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Fewer than 2,000 survived.

There is no way to write that number so that it stops looking abstract. It is very nearly an entire city's community, inside twelve weeks.

Where you can meet it today

• The Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki on Agiou Mina Street, housed in one of the few buildings to survive the 1917 fire, telling the community's story from arrival to deportation.
• The Monastirioton Synagogue, the only pre-war synagogue still standing of the more than thirty that once served the city.
• The Holocaust Memorial on Eleftherias Square, where in 1942 the men of the community were publicly humiliated.
• Eleftherias Square and the old railway station: the two points that mark the beginning and the end.

How to visit

Give it half a day and take it in order: museum, synagogue, memorial. The Jewish Museum keeps limited hours and the synagogue is not always open to visitors, so check before you go and arrange a visit where one is needed.

If you read one thing before you come, read about what stood here before. The buildings you will see are few; what is missing is the subject.