Greek Jewish Community

Jewish community used to play important roles in Greek’s history. Before World War II, there were 75,000 Jews living in Greece. Nonetheless, today, there were less than 5500 of Jews living in Greece. By 1941, before Jews’ deportation began, over 55,000 Jews lived in Thessaloniki or locally known as Salonica or Saloniki, while in Athens during these periods, there were less than 1,000 Jews lived there. Today, contrarily there were 3,500 Jews live in Athens, but only less than 1000 Jews live in Salonica in the middle of homeless ghost of their parents and siblings. Hereinafter, in the rest areas of Greece, Jews are almost hard to find. When we look back the history of Greek Jews, there were two tremendous genocidal plans happened that affected the number of Jews living in Greece up to present day. They were: antisemitic event in summer 1931 and the World War II during German’s occupation. On the eve of World War II, Greek Jews lived in three distinct areas spread out throughout the Greece: South, West and North. In the South, it was involved Peloponnesos, Attike, and Boeotia of ancient times, and called Morea since late Byzantine and Ottoman

The situation in Northern Greece was quite different compared to other part of regions where Jews lived in. The traditions of the Greek speaking Jews of Macedonia, Thrace, and Central Greece virtually disappeared after the conquest of Ottoman Empire in the 15th century. In 1455, Mehmet II ordered the deportation of Greek-speaking Jewish community in Thrace, Macedonia, and Central Greece in order to repopulate his new capital. Meanwhile, in the next decade, the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, Sephardim, migrated to Ottoman Empire and encouraged to live in the areas where Jews were avoiding. Consequently, the Jewish community was flourished in the northern tier of Greece, with Salonica as its