History of The Jews of Thessaloniki - Post World War II

Post World War II

At the end of the Second World War, a violent civil war broke out in Greece. It lasted until 1949, with forces in Athens supported by the British opposition to the powerful Communist ELAS. Some of the Jews of Thessaloniki who had escaped deportation took part in it, either on the government or on the opposition side. Among those who fought in the ELAS many were victims, like other supporters, of the repression that fell on the country after the government had regained control of the situation.

Among the few survivors of the camps, some chose to return to Greece and others emigrated to Western Europe, America or the Palestine Mandate. They were all faced with great difficulties in surviving, as both Greece and all Europe were in a chaotic state in the immediate aftermath of war. They also suffered discrimination from some Ashkenazi survivors who cast doubt on their Jewishness.

The return to Thessaloniki was a shock. Returnees were often the sole survivors from their families. They returned to find their homes occupied by Christian families who had purchased them from the Germans. Initially, they were housed in synagogues. A Jewish Committee was formed to identify the number of survivors, and obtained a list from the Bank of Greece of 1,800 houses that had been sold to Christians. The new owners were reluctant to surrender their new dwellings, saying they had legally purchased the houses and that they too had suffered from war. When the war ended, the left wing ELAS, which at the time controlled the city, favored the immediate return of Jewish property to its rightful owners. Four months later, when the new British-supported right wing government in Athens came to power in Thessaloniki instead, restitution was cumulatively halted. Not only was the government faced with a major housing crisis due to the influx of refugees caused by war, but a number of individuals who had been enriched during the war were also influential in the new right wing administration, with the government's view favouring strengthening all anticommunist ties by adopting a more conciliatory approach to any former collaborators. The Jewish Agency denounced such policies of the postwar administration, and pleaded for the cause of the Aliyah Jews. The World Jewish Congress also aided the Jews of the city; some of the Jews saved from deportation by Greeks chose to convert to Orthodoxy. Some isolated survivors of the camps made the same choice. There were also several marriages among the post-war survivors. One survivor testified:

I returned to a Salonika destroyed. I was hoping to find my adopted brother, but rumor told that he had died of malaria in Lublin. I already knew that my parents had been burned on their first day at the extermination camp of Auschwitz. I was alone. Other prisoners who were with me had nobody either. These days, I am with a young man that I had known in Brussels. We do not separate from each other. We were both survivors of the camps. Shortly after, we married, two refugees who had nothing, there was not even a rabbi to give us the blessing. The director of one of the Jewish schools served as a rabbi and we married, and so I started a new life.

1,783 survivors were listed in the 1951 census.

A monument in Thessaloniki to the tragedy of the deportation was erected in 1997.

In 1998, King Juan Carlos I of Spain went to the city, where he paid tribute to the Sephardic Jews. The visit followed one he had undertaken at the synagogue of Madrid in 1992 to commemorate the expulsion of 1492, at which he condemned the decree of expulsion from Spain.

Following the requests of Professors at the Aristotle University, a memorial to the Jewish cemetery lying beneath the foundations of the institution is awaited.

Today, around 1,300 Jews live in Thessaloniki, making it the second largest Jewish community in Greece after Athens.

Israeli singer Yehuda Poliker recorded a song about the deported Jews of Thessaloniki, called 'Wait for me Thessaloniki'.