Chalkida

The next day we headed to chalkida, and stayed at a hotel right on the water.There we visited an old synagoge. The synagoge and it's history was told to us in three different languages.First Greek,which was translated into Hebrew by a women, which was in turn translated by rabbi Dov into English.  There had been a synagoge in this place, we were told, since the 14 Th century. During the war most of the Jews fled leaving behind a mere 327 in the Jewish community. When the Nazis arrived in chalkida they demanded that the archbishop write a list of all the Jewish families living in his city. Instead of a questing to their demands the archbishop spent three full days writing his own name on each line, giving an opportunity for all the Jews to escape. Out of the 327 Jews only 22 where killed. We discussed what had allowed so many Jews to survive. Perhaps it was that they were integrated into the  community, someone suggested. Though we are often taught in school that Jews lived separate lives in 'shtetals' here in Greece it was their assimilation and involvement with the greater community that saved them. Because their neighbors saw them first and for most as Greeks and their brethren, they opened their own homes to them and risking their own lives helped the Jews escape into the mountains. 

From the synagogue we were taken to the Jewish cemetery, it's caretaker and the former president of the Shul payed for it's upkeep out of his own pocket, and had discovered there graves from the 1300s. By the cemetery was a monument to the archbishop that had rescued so many- the only Jewish cemetery in the world which has a bust honoring a non-Jew. We walked around the cemetery in silence. Seeing some neyrot I quietly bent down to lit them, and assure myself and these souls that they were remembered. How incredible that these Jews who did not have Hebrew as their mother tongue had chosen to inscribe their gravestones with lashon hakodesh! It was interesting that as the graves became newer there was less Hebrew writing and the hebrew gave way slowly to Greek. I wondered if it was sad. For hundreds of years the Jews of chalikida commemorated their dead in Hebrew alone, and then,over the past century that language had slowly disappeared.