The Jewish community of Rhodes was one of the oldest in the eastern Mediterranean and one of the last to be destroyed. The Sephardic congregation in the city of Rhodes had been continuously inhabited for around four hundred and fifty years, since the arrival of refugees from the Iberian expulsions of 1492 and 1497. Around 1,700 Jews lived on the island in the summer of 1944. On 23 July 1944 they were arrested by the German occupation authorities. They were shipped first to Athens, then loaded onto a Auschwitz-bound transport from Piraeus, and arrived at the camp on 16 August. Around 151 returned. The community was destroyed in three weeks.
The Sephardic community
The Jews of Rhodes had arrived from Spain and Portugal in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, settling under the protection of Ottoman rule which had taken the island from the Knights of Saint John in 1522. They built a substantial community in the city of Rhodes, mostly in the walled old town in the quarter known as the Juderia, which surrounded the central La Juderia square (now Plateia Martiron Evraion, the Square of the Jewish Martyrs).
The community was deeply Sephardic in language and culture. Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish brought from Iberia, was the everyday language for four centuries; the community’s documents, its rabbinic correspondence and its prayer customs preserved Sephardic traditions that had largely disappeared elsewhere. The Kahal Shalom synagogue, built in 1577, is the oldest synagogue in Greece and remains in occasional use. The community ran its own schools (notably the Alliance Israélite Universelle school from 1884), its own cemetery, its own welfare societies and its own rabbinical court. It was, despite its small size, one of the more intellectually distinguished Sephardic communities of the eastern Mediterranean.
The community had numbered around 4,000 in the early twentieth century. Steady emigration from the 1920s onwards, particularly to the Belgian Congo, to Rhodesia and to the United States, reduced the population. The Italian fascist racial laws of 1938, applied to Italian-administered Rhodes, accelerated the departures. By the time of the German occupation of the island in September 1943 around 1,700 Jews remained, some of them recent arrivals from elsewhere in the Dodecanese.
The deportation of July 1944
Italy had administered Rhodes since the Italo-Turkish War of 1912. Italian rule had not protected the Jews from the racial laws but had protected them, until 1943, from deportation. The Italian armistice of 8 September 1943 changed that. Germany occupied Rhodes within days. The German occupation administration on the island, under General Ulrich Kleemann and the Higher SS and Police Leader for Greece, Walter Schimana, began preparing the operation against the Rhodes community in the spring of 1944.
The arrest order was given on 19 July 1944. On 23 July 1944, Jewish men were ordered to report to the Italian Air Force Command building in the city of Rhodes. The men complied. They were detained. The next day, families were ordered to bring jewellery, cash and identity papers; women, children and the elderly were arrested as they arrived. Around 1,673 Jews from Rhodes and a further 96 from neighbouring Kos were held in the city for approximately a week.
The detainees were taken by sea to Piraeus on the mainland in three small ships. The journey took thirteen days under poor conditions. From Piraeus they were transferred by rail across occupied Greece and the Balkans to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The transport arrived on 16 August 1944. On selection at the ramp, around 1,200 people were sent directly to the gas chambers. Around 400 were registered into the camp for slave labour. Of these, approximately 151 survived to liberation.
The aftermath
The community of Rhodes did not return. The Jewish quarter in the old city had been damaged by Allied bombing during the war and was further reduced during the post-war period. The Kahal Shalom synagogue survived and was restored in the 1990s. The Jewish Museum of Rhodes, opened in 1997 in part of the synagogue complex, documents the community’s four-and-a-half-century history and its destruction.
The Square of the Jewish Martyrs in the centre of the old Juderia carries a memorial: a black granite obelisk inscribed in Hebrew, Greek, French, Italian and Ladino with the names and dates of those murdered. The square is the entry point for the museum and the synagogue. The community of Rhodes today numbers fewer than fifty people, many of them descendants of those who emigrated before the war. The annual community memorial on 23 July is held in the square.
Sources
- Aron Hasson and others (eds), The Sephardic Jews of Rhodes, Sephardic Hebrew Center of Los Angeles, multiple editions
- Marc D. Angel, The Jews of Rhodes: The History of a Sephardic Community, Sepher-Hermon Press, 1978
- Steven B. Bowman, The Agony of Greek Jews 1940-1945, Stanford University Press, 2009
- Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation 1941-1944, Yale University Press, 1993
- Esther Fintz Menascé, Gli ebrei a Rodi: Storia di un’antica comunità annientata dai nazisti, Guerini, 1992
- Stella Levi (with Michael Frank), One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World, Avid Reader Press, 2022
- Jewish Museum of Rhodes, https://www.rhodesjewishmuseum.org
- USHMM, Rhodes deportation collection, https://collections.ushmm.org