Salonika

Thursday had already arrived, so we began to make the journey to thsaloniki for Shabbat.  On our way we stopped in tevariyah a city which had once had a thriving jewish community and now only had two jewish families left. We went  to this synagoge which had been rebuilt after the war by Gentiles, perhaps to rid themselves of the guilt they felt for standing by silently watching the Jews demise.  The synagoge was eerie. There was a locked empty Aaron and posters on the walls with misspelled Hebrew. An attempt to recreate an environment the non Jews probaly knew little about. A thought ran through my head... The nazis had collected Jewish artifacts with which they intended to create a muesam to the "destroyed race". In a sense these people had completed what the nazis had left unfinished. Here stood a building as a testimony to a community which had now vanished, a wittness to the extent to which the nazis desecrated this cities jews. We sang in the Shul, a strange experience as this was not really a place of worship but merely an imitation. After we walked to a park. It was cold and dark and we wondered why we had been brought to such a place. We all gathered in the center of the basketball court well rav dov gravely explained that this park had once been a Jewish cemetery. Any stones that had not been destroyed by the bulldozers had been haphazardly throw on the hillside, amid cast away soda cans. We said kaddash in the middle of the sports court. And then got back on the bus to solonika.

 Salonika is the second biggest city in Greece and a bustling metropolis, filled with shops cafes and bars.  Friday morning we might with the chief rabbi, an Israeli who came on shlichut 9 years ago and has been there ever since. A man who always seems to be smiling he spoke to us in the larger of the two synagoges left in thsalonika. He explained how after the world war survivors were stunned to see their chandelier missing and to discover it had been adopted by a church. Though the priest attempted to reassure tthem that it was irrelevant where the chandelier was provided it was in 'a house of god', the chandelier was quickly returned to it's rightful place. In past years the rabbi taught our group the  'adio' a ladino love song which mourns the sphardic Jews loss of their homeland Spain. We had learnt the song prior to our trip, and so this time we sang the song to him. Later in the day we went to the jewish museum and explored the richness of Jewish life in salonika. Salonika had once been a city of Jews. A seaside city, the ports had actually been closed for Shabbat, and Ben goryin when he visited the city was so struck by it that he said it felt more like a Jewish homeland then Israel. Now however there is only a small community left, and the graves of their ancestors lies underneath the university. A cemetery that once had been the largest in the world 30 hecters wide buried and forgotten.

Shabbat in salonika was wonderful. We davened with the congregation both kabbalot Shabbat and shacharit, and ate the meals in a hall upstairs. On the walls of the small synagoge where plaques commemorating the 160 beytay kneset that had once stood in the city. We read the names out loud, many of them where named after the places the congregation had immigrated from. Italy, pruage, the list continued endlessly. During the meal as a small token to our own culture we sang the national anthem and had inflatable turkey centerpieces and napkins.  many thought of their families back in the states and fondly remembered their thanksgiving traditions.