Poleshuck Greece 2018

Wednesday, October 17, 2018 Athens We started the day at the small but vibrant Jewish Museum of Athens.   We’ve been here before.   The thrust of the museum is more to explain Judaism to non-Jewish visitors than to educate those who are Jewish.   The displays explain holidays, rituals, etc., with some historic content. We had a lovely, long meeting with the museum director, Zanet Battinon, who answered our questions about the Athenian Jewish community and recent Jewish history in Athens with candor and directness.   She was lovely and extremely well-spoken.   We had lunch at a local restaurant. Nearby, and across the street from each other, are two synagogues.   Yes, there are lots of jokes about this kind of thing.   The reality here is that the old synagogue was outgrown by the influx of Sephardic Jews, and the new synagogue, Beit Shalom, was built across the street in 1935 to accommodate the increased numbers.   In the new syna...

October 16, 2018  Delphi A remarkable day. We drove to Delphi, high up in the mountains, passing beautiful villages such as Arahova: On the way we had a wonderful talk from our Greek guide explaining the Oracle at Delphi.   She was thought to truly represent the gods, and important people, from kings to heads of state to generals came to ask her questions.   The problem was, she answered in unintelligible grunts, screeches and shouts, so her utterings required interpretation by the priests of Apollo’s temple, which is where she sat and held court.   There are many theories as to what substances she partook of, but whatever they were, they rendered her unfathomable.   For sure there were vapors of some sort, and she chewed on laurel leaves.   Many city-states had treasuries at Delphi where riches were brought to be used to access the Oracle.   It was quite a system!   We were told that the person asking questions of the Oracle usu...

Monday, October 15 Today was mostly a travel day south, with stops at two towns, Veroia and Larissa.   On our way out of Salonika we stopped at the old train station where there is a modest memorial to the 50,000 Jews who were shipped to Auschwitz to be murdered. There is a remarkable graffiti sample on the wall of the station: We then drove southwest to the lovely town of Veroia where we visited the synagogue which is maintained by a lovely young   Greek Orthodox woman who has made the restoration and preservation of this structure her work, with intermittent and inconsistent support from various organizations. It is said that Paul preached and prayed in Veroia in the 1st century CE, and that a Romaniote Jewish community existed here until they were incorporated into the Sephardic one after the expulsion from Spain.  There are only two Jews left in this town. We continued south to the city of Larissa where a Jewish commun...

Salonika, Saturday-Sunday, October 13-14 Shabbat: A day of rest with nothing scheduled until 4PM on Saturday.   We slept late, and after breakfast wandered downtown Salonika.   At 4:00 we had a study session with Rabbi Morey Schwartz, the Melton International Director who has been traveling with us.   The topic began with readings from Parshat Noach concerning the Tower of Babel, and included readings from the Babylonian Talmud, Homer and Josephus regarding language and its place in uniting and diving peoples. We then had a walk along the waterfront, where the pre-war population was heavily Jewish, including all of the dock workers.   There is a Holocaust memorial in a small park there: It has been pointed out to us on more than one occasion that most of the Greek Holocaust memorials and monuments have been erected by various Greek municipalities and governments in contradistinction to those seen in Polish cities and towns which have almost all ...

Thessaloniki Day One We had an early start as we departed Ioannina for Salonika (Thessaloniki) at 7:45 AM.   One of the day’s readings truly set the tone for how we understand the place of the Jews in Salonika, and I’ll put the entire passage here.   It dates from just a few years after the expulsion from Spain in 1492: Invitation to Jews by the Ottoman Leadership to Settle Therein, late 15th century. “It [the Ottoman Empire] is entirely open to you; settle here, our brethren, in the best of the land!...the poor and needy…will find here…a place where their feet can rest, and they will be able to exercise a suitable profession; they will suffer neither hunger nor thirst, they will not be afflicted by the burning fire of oppression and of exile, because the Lord has bestowed upon us His mercy, and He has made us find favor, grace and pity in the eyes of the nations in the midst of which we are living, to such a degree that it would almost be proper to give us a ne...

October 10-11, 2018     We have been astonishingly busy.   Wednesday morning began with an introduction to the Romaniote Jews with a talk from Avi titled “The Historic Trajectory of Greek Jewry until the Ottoman Conquest.”   Jews from the Middle East came to Greece and other parts of the eastern Mediterranean since the time of Alexander the Great, some 2300 years ago, long before the second Temple times, and persisted in substantial numbers until WW II.   Their practices were unique, and despite the lands in which they lived being overwhelmed with Sephardic Jews after the expulsion from Spain in 1492, their communities persevered.   Thus, in this area of the world, there were two separate Jewish communities during the Ottoman times and up to the German occupation, Romaniote and Sephardic. We drove to Volos where we first visited the Holocaust Memorial monument in the center of town: Remarkably, about 70% of Volos’ Jews were saved by ac...