Thessaloniki Part Two: The Echos

My experiences with the newest generation of Europe's once most significant Jewish community, observing the undying spirit of Thessalonikian Jewry in their young adults today.

Nissim shows me a photo of a staircase crowded with 17 brides and grooms. Without any context, one might think it was some kind of cult mass wedding like the Moonies. But no, they are all Jews, living in Thessaloniki in 1946. And they are all Holocaust survivors.

I look at each of their faces… Some had spent the last few years hiding in an attic, others had fought the Nazis with the Greek resistance. Most of them had just survived Auschwitz. Their faces are very thin. It’s too painful to think about what those eyes have seen.

And now imagine… You come home from these unimaginably horrific experiences to find out 19/20 of all your friends and family have been murdered. Your neighbor claimed your house and all your belongings. Everything that used to be a part of your world was destroyed, figuratively and literally. Your synagogue, Jewish community center, every Jewish business that used to be part of your daily life (your doctor, your school, your tailor), is demolished. Even the Jewish cemetery where your family has been buried for centuries is destroyed. The location is unrecognizable. A university has been built on top of it. Thousands of years of your proud history are erased.

Nissim is a young Thessalonikan Jew who works at the local Jewish museum. He’s soft spoken but extremely articulate, each word chosen carefully. As we stand staring at the photo, he explains there’s a Greek phrase for these women that roughly translates as, “brides without a smile.” Auschwitz was liberated on January 27th, 1945. The picture was taken April 7th, 1946. That couldn’t have been enough time for 34 people to return home, adjust from one nightmare to another, and truly fall in love. But from what I gather, that’s not even the primary reason for the lacking smiles. Throughout time and place, with or without love, girls look forward to their weddings to celebrate their next chapter. All their friends and family gather to watch their lives take a new form. Now not only have these women lost 97% of their friends and family, it’s not even about their next chapter. It’s the next chapter for the Jews of Thessaloniki. After everything they endured, I imagine they also needed to be a part of something greater, to have survived for a bigger purpose. So they survived to fight for what’s left of their community. The entire continuance of their 2,000-year-old community, the once greatest Jewish community in all of Europe, was on their shoulders. In other words, if they don’t put personal feelings aside and reproduce, they will go extinct and the Nazis will have won.

That intense communal responsibility still perseveres tirelessly in the Thessaloniki Jewish community today.

I met Lina on a beach outside Thessaloniki and we hit it off immediately. Sometimes I sense an initial barrier when I introduce myself as a journalist. People are cautious—maybe wary I have a specific angle or hopeful that I’ll represent their community in a certain way. But since I’m an informal 27-year-old who is also excited to make new friends, those walls usually aren’t tall for long. Lina, however, was 100% authentic from the start. All the questions in my head were immediately swept away with conversations about terrible jobs, crazy girls, quality friendships and dating woes.

If there’s one topic that easily unites all women, even those who come from opposite sides of the planet, of course it’s men. We’re two single 27-year olds floating on a beach ball in the Aegean Sea talking about our love lives. But the core of the conversation is something that 99.98% of the world’s singles cannot relate to.

Lina tells me, “Of course, I want to marry a Jewish guy and have a Jewish family.” There’s no need to even discuss this shared desire; it’s obvious to both of us that this is a given.

At that moment I felt oddly connected to this girl from Thessaloniki that I’ve known for 30 minutes. She instinctively empathizes with a deep part of me that most of my non-Jewish best friends never will. We may be modern women in 2022 tanning in our bikinis, but we view one of our roles in this world, one deeply important to us, is to have descendants that identify with our people.

Lina continues, “But what are my options?” We talked about how it’s hard enough to find someone that’s both a practical match and a deep love connection. “Now imagine being limited to the Jewish guys our age in Thessaloniki. Even if I count all the single guys five years younger and older than me, I'd have about five guys to choose from.” The challenge continues. She’s grown up with most of them since childhood, attending the tiny Jewish school together, where she was one of five in her class. They all feel like brothers.

Then she tells me what has become one of my favorite stories I gathered on this trip. Turns out, Lina is not someone who sits around moping about a challenge. She’s a resourceful Jewish woman who sees a problem, has hope, and gets creative. She decided to host an international Jewish speed dating event. She spoke as if it didn’t go well because many of her fellow young Greek Jews didn’t support it. Apparently, they thought the event sounded awkward and weren’t willing to withstand some potential discomfort for the cause. But personally, I think this makes her journey all the more impressive, for persisting without local support.

Lina shared the Jewish speed dating idea with her international friends from various European Jewish conferences she attended. Since Greece was my first stop on this trip, I didn’t consider how Lina’s same predicament spanned tons of young European Jews. Most European Jewish communities had over 90% of their population decimated 2 generations ago, putting them all in similarly tiny Jewish communities with practically non-existent dating scenes. Lina’s international Jewish friends replied with a resounding “Just tell me when and where, and I’ll bring my friends. ”

25 people attended representing 10 different countries, right there on a random little beach near Thessaloniki. It even resulted in one Jewish marriage, all because of Lina’s ambition.

At the Holocaust museum before walking away from the photo of these “brides without a smile”, I had to ask Nissim a personal question. “Do you know some of these people personally?”

“Yep, my grandparents are actually in another similar picture though. There were multiple mass weddings.” Most of the Thessaloniki Jews my age are direct descendants, just two generations down.

The night before I had a beer with Jacko (another young Thessaloniki Jew), who described his relationship as one of the Jewish summer camp’s success stories: he met his Jewish girlfriend there. He explained that most young Thessaloniki Jews either move to Israel or intermarry.

Throughout our conversations Jacko was beaming with pride about his community. His eyes glowed as he described the huge new Holocaust memorial building about to be erected in town. He reminisced about childhood, when he would wake up and look out the window, eagerly awaiting the Jewish community center’s light to go on so he could run over and begin playing with his friends. Even though much of the information he shared reflected the sad reality of the community’s painfully small and shrinking population, Jacko somehow always found something inspirational to compliment it. Today so few Jewish children remain that in a recent year a nearby town's one Jewish school was down to one enrolled student. “We were all so proud of him. He was so brave, going to school all by himself, just him and the teachers. He was just a little boy but he was committed to keeping the school open.”

The photo of the mass wedding was displayed in a room entirely dedicated to the community’s efforts to survive after the war. Nissim pointed me to photos of four post-war Maccabi Thessaloniki teams (Jewish sports teams). I nodded as Nissim described how the Maccabi teams competed against all the other national teams. Jacko had proudly told me all about their basketball team, an incredible source of recognition for the Thessaloniki Jewish community in mainstream Greek media. As we moved past the Maccabi team photo, Nissim casually remarked that of the four teams, only one, the basketball team, remains… and who knows for how much longer.

Though I had been discussing the shrinking Jewish communities in Greece for weeks, at that moment, I was suddenly struck by the story’s urgency and importance. Jews sought refuge here for 2,000 years. While European Jews usually lived as second class citizens or through constant persecution, Jews held the majority population of Thessaloniki for over 500 years. It was inarguably the most important Jewish community in all of Europe. At its peak, there were 70,000 Jews in Thessaloniki. After the Holocaust there were 2,000. Today there’s 1,000. In 2022, I’m exploring the nature of these living relics, fragmented but recognizable echoes of the grandest European Jewish community of all time.

I got to connect with some of the last people who will experience a Thessaloniki Jewish community like the one Nissim, Jacko, and Lina grew up in. All three explained that many of their peers are moving to Israel or Athens. They typically move for career reasons, to follow a spouse, or to look for a larger Jewish community. Realistically, how much longer will any Jews be able to find a Jewish partner there? How much longer will it make sense to keep the Jewish school? The Jewish basketball team?

I have hope that there will always be some Jewish presence in Thessaloniki. I don’t believe you need a Jewish school, or a Jewish basketball team, or even a Jewish spouse to raise Jewish children. The declining population is unsettling, but I believe I found something there that is even more important for a community’s survival.

If there’s one core part of the Thessaloniki Jewish spirit that I observed thriving through all my interactions, it’s a deep, fulfilling, and empowering devotion to their community. I could see it in every task Lina had to tackle to complete her international Jewish speed dating event. I could hear it in Jacko’s proud tone, describing every detail of the programs he participated in and his work on the youth board. I could picture it within that little boy who attended school all alone to keep Jewish education alive. I could observe it in Nissim’s tour, his passionate commitment to educate the world about his people at the Holocaust Museum. In each of them, I saw proud reflections of those brides and grooms. I saw fervent communal responsibility, inspiring them to live their lives as a part of something important, immense, and empowering. Here, I enjoyed a glimpse into the power of the Thessaloniki Jewish spirit, echoing through time.