Veroia and Larissa


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 community of 300 survives, and met with the rabbi of the community.  He was lovely, but not very optimistic about the future of his congregation.  The young people all move away for education and jobs, and it does not sound like a vibrant core left.  They seem to be hanging on.  The rabbi is “retired” and in his 70s, and it’s not clear what will happen when he is no longer able to be the leader.  They have a lovely synagogue, the only one left of four which used to be here:



We continued south, stopping for the night at a coastal resort hotel, and Tuesday will find us in Delphi.

Comments

  1. Ralph P. LockeOctober 17, 2018 at 2:33 AM

    Fascinating, and admirable, that the local Greek communities understood the Jews in their midst as being fellow Greeks, not foreign interlopers. Even though many of the Jews had come a mere 500 years earlier (not 2000 years) and to some extent spoke their own language (Ladino).

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