Honoring and Remembering the Burial Ground of a European Jewish Community Ravaged by the Holocaust

My wife Jackie and I joined WJC more than 30 years ago when our oldest child, Rachel, was of nursery school age. WJC quickly became both our spiritual home as well as the place where we met some of our longest and dearest friends. Wanting to get involved, I soon joined the Cemetery Committee. Today, I am the President of WJC Cemetery Association, Inc., or WJCCA, the independent Connecticut corporation responsible for running WJC’s section of the Glenville Jewish Cemetery in Greenwich, CT.

As I will share in a moment, I had some very personal reasons for getting involved with our cemetery—stretching back decades to my family’s roots in the once-thriving but ultimately tragic, Jewish community in the port city of Salonika, in what is now Greece. But first, a bit of background on our own cemetery:

One of WJC’s first actions as a congregation, almost 100 years ago, was to locate and to purchase a burial place for its members. WJC found a beautiful, wooded and serene spot, and in 1926 joined congregations from Port Chester, White Plains, New Rochelle, and Greenwich. While the cemetery is over 60 acres, the initial portion reserved for burials was less than 8 acres.

I attribute my initial involvement in the Cemetery Committee to the charm and persistence of its then-president, Gerhard Spies. As many congregants remember, Gerhard had a special talent for getting WJC members to help him with various projects that interested him, including our cemetery; the establishment of a Holocaust Memorial and Holocaust Learning Center; and the care and preservation of one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in Europe in Worms, Germany, which survived the Holocaust, unlike many of its inhabitants.

I agreed to help WJCCA more than 30 years ago because I believed that as a real estate lawyer interested in history and legacy, that I could be of service, and that I would find such service rewarding and challenging. I have not been disappointed.

Under Gerhard’s leadership as president, and with the assistance of many—including WJC officers, the Cemetery Committee and WJCCA’s board members and volunteers—we have modernized WJCCA’s corporate governance by adopting new bylaws, as well as rules and regulations for the operation and maintenance of the cemetery. We have also replaced its crumbling paper maps and supplemented our paper records with a specialized computer burial records. Finally, with our assumption of the New Rochelle section of the Glenville Cemetery in 1984 upon the dissolution of its congregation, we had an opportunity to quadruple the size of WJC’s section. With the completion of our expansion project in the early 2000s, we have created a cemetery that should meet our future needs, along with a substantial endowment to ensure its continued maintenance.

What I have come to realize over time is that my lasting interest and commitment to WJC’s cemetery has parallels to Gerhard’s. In his case it was born out of his love for the people of Worms—including the family members and ancestors buried in its cemetery—and his appreciation for why all of that should be cherished and preserved.

My ancestors’ story of Salonika and its Holocaust history is different—but my love for them has compelled me to honor them and to follow in Gerhard’s footsteps.

As many of our longest-tenured members know, I am Sephardic. All four of my grandparents were born in the 1890s in the second largest city in Greece, then known as Salonika and later as Thessaloniki. It is an important port city in northern Greece at the head of the Aegean Sea and at the base of the mountains of Macedonia—part of what is commonly called the Balkans.

Salonika is a community where, remarkably, Jews, Christians and Muslims coexisted for centuries in relative harmony. Salonika became a significant Sephardic community after the expulsion of the Sephardic Jews from Spain in 1492. For many Iberian Jews, the Muslim countries that were part of the vast Ottoman Empire were a natural and comfortable choice to establish new roots without fear of further persecution.

Many immigrated to Salonika, a city that had fallen on hard that could be their safe haven and city of refuge. In Salonika for more than 400 years, the Iberian Sephardic Jews were able to freely and openly practice their religion, speak Spanish and their unique tongue, Ladino or Judeo-Spanish, and observe their Sephardic traditions with minimal interference by their Ottoman rulers. Their world was a deeply religious one filled with Spanish traditions and Ladino parables, expressions, and superstitions.

My grandparents ate Middle Eastern and Turkish dishes, listened to Turkish and Middle Eastern music, and even danced with belly dancers. The Iberian Jews lived and prospered over the next four centuries, as Jews were the dominant religious faith in the city and dominant ethnic population. As the stevedores and merchants they ran the busy port—the commercial life blood of the city, closing it on Shabbat. They built more than 30 synagogues, religious schools, and other community facilities that became a model for Jewish communal life and Jewish learning. It was a city where Kabbalah was studied, famous Rabbis taught, and home to Shabbati Zevi, the self-proclaimed 17th century Messiah. Salonika was called “Little Jerusalem” or “Mother of Israel,” home to almost 100,000 Jews in 1900, a true Jewish jewel.

During those 400 years, they expanded the Jewish cemetery in the center of Salonika dating back to Roman times. At the time of my grandparents’ births, it was the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe, with an estimated 350,000 Jewish souls buried there.

The turn of the 20th century brought big changes to Salonika as the Ottoman Empire was crumbling. The Balkans Wars (1912-1913), the Greek nationalism movement with the formal incorporation of Salonika as “Thessaloniki” into Greece in 1913, and the winds of the impending first World War made Salonika less and less a safe haven for its large Jewish population. The Greeks expected the Jews—now as citizens of Greece—to speak

Greek rather than Ladino or Spanish, go to Greek schools, close their shops on Sunday rather than Saturday, and obey Greek laws.

It was at this point that my grandparents and many other Jews began making plans to come to the United States. Those who chose to remain faced rising anti-Semitism from their now “fellow Greeks” who did not understand their religion, culture or ways. Fortunately for my grandparents and for me and my relatives, they made the commitment and sacrifices to establish a new life in a new world.

Following Greek independence in 1913, the Greek government began a campaign to move the Jewish Cemetery out of the center of the city to make room for the expansion of the university, which was built adjacent to the Jewish Cemetery.

Thessaloniki was occupied by the Nazis in April 1941 and restrictive laws were imposed on its Jewish inhabitants. In 1942, all Jewish men were conscripted into forced labor, and only released—temporarily—when the Jewish community paid an enormous ransom. Ultimately, in 1943, 46,000 Jews, representing 96 percent of the remaining Jewish community, were deported to Auschwitz–Birkenau, with fewer than 2,000 surviving. That represented the highest fatality rate of any major Jewish community in Nazi-occupied Europe. Sadly, included among the dead were surely some of my grandparents’ relatives.

The Nazis together with their Greek collaborators seized the opportunity to destroy (and not relocate) the vast Jewish cemetery, bulldozing its stone monuments, looting its graves and ultimately re-using its valuable stone monuments, with inscriptions still visible, throughout the city in its churches, sidewalks, public buildings, and public works projects without regard for their sacred value. In the 1950s, the university was expanded over the footprint of the cemetery without a monument or an acknowledgment of its prior use. This was a unique end as most of the Jewish cemeteries throughout Europe were spared destruction by the Nazis and their collaborators.

The destruction of the Jewish Cemetery in Salonika, as well as the killing of its Jewish population, brought a tangible end to the city’s long, vibrant Jewish history. Today, there are fewer than 1,000 Jews proudly maintaining two synagogues, a school, an old-age home, a small museum, a small cemetery and a Holocaust memorial. Today most residents of Thessaloniki know little of its four centuries of Ottoman and Jewish history and the Greek authorities have done little to remind them.

This loss reminds me of the importance of honoring our ancestors and preserving their final resting places.