As part of a trip to Greece in 2023, I visited Thessaloniki, the country’s second-largest city, with over one million inhabitants in its metropolitan area, and learned about the tragic fate of its Jews during the Second World War.
On the eve of the war, about 77,000 Jews lived in Greece, with roughly 56,000 in Thessaloniki. The city’s Jewish community was prominent in industry, banking, tourism, and the trades, with many working as laborers, artisans, and port workers.
The Germans invaded Greece on April 6, 1941, and occupied Thessaloniki three days later. The Jewish community council was arrested, apartments were seized, and the Jewish hospital was taken over by the German Army. Jewish newspapers in French and Ladino were shut down, replaced by antisemitic and collaborationist publications. The looting of literary and cultural treasures from libraries and synagogues was carried out by “Operation Rosenberg,” aided by the Wehrmacht. That first winter, some 600 Jews died from hypothermia and disease.
On July 11, 1942, 9,000 Jewish men aged 18–45 were ordered to gather in Liberty Square, where they were humiliated in the summer heat—a day remembered as “Black Saturday.” The Jewish community negotiated their release in exchange for a ransom, funded in part by selling the 500-year-old Jewish cemetery to the Municipality. The cemetery was destroyed, and its tombstones used as building material. About 2,000 men were sent as forced laborers; by October 1942, 250 had died under harsh conditions.
In February 1943, Jews were ordered into a ghetto in the Baron Hirsch quarter. Their property was confiscated, and deportations to Auschwitz and Treblinka began the following month. By August, nearly the entire Jewish population of Thessaloniki—some 54,000 people—had been murdered in the Holocaust.
The “Menorah in flames” sculpture, created in 1997 by Nandor Glid, commemorates these deportations. Glid (1924–1997), a Yugoslav sculptor, is also known for the memorial at the Dachau concentration camp. Installed since 2006 on Eleftherias Square, the site of the 1942 roundup, it was the first Holocaust memorial in a public space in Greece—a sign of changing official attitudes toward Holocaust remembrance. Sadly, it is regularly vandalized.
I also visited the Monastir Synagogue, built between 1925 and 1927 with funding from Jews from Monastir in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Architect Ernst Loewy (1878–1943) of Austria-Hungary designed it while working for the Austrian company that built the Thessaloniki–Vienna railway. During the war, the building survived by being requisitioned by the Red Cross. Severely damaged by a 1978 earthquake, it was later restored by the Greek government, with the final historic restoration completed in 2016 and supported by the Federal Republic of Germany.
Today, the synagogue is used primarily during the High Holidays. Daily services are held at a newer synagogue shared with the Rabbinate and the offices of the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki on Tsimiski Street, near the Jewish Museum.
Thessaloniki’s once-thriving Jewish community is gone, but the memorials, the synagogue, and the stories that remain keep its memory alive.
