My vicarious trip to Greece

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

I have been privileged to travel many places in my life, but there are still a few countries to which I would love to go – and Greece is one of them. Just a photo of the white-washed dwellings set against a backdrop of the Aegean Sea is enough to make me relaxed and day-dreamy. So, when my parents mentioned that they were planning a month-long trip to that part of the world, I was a little jealous. Unable to join them when they went there this fall, I have had to experience the vacation vicariously and here I share "our" photos of the Jewish museum and a synagogue in Athens.

My mother explained to me that the museum is in the Plaka, which is an area like Yorkville in Toronto, and the synagogue is walking distance from the centrally located Monastiraki subway stop, not far from the Agora, which is an historical ruin (an ancient market place).

At the Jewish Museum of Greece, my parents were, in my mother's words, "blessed with the opportunity to meet Rosa Beneviste, an 87-year-old-Jew who was born in Thessalonika and who, with great compassion, held us spellbound for 45 minutes as she wove the various strands that are the history of the Jews in Greece."

The ground floor of the museum houses the restored interior of the old Romaniote synagogue of the now-defunct Jewish community of Patras. Upstairs, a wide variety of traditional items of religious or domestic use are displayed, showing the everyday life of the Jews of Greece and the important moments that act as landmarks for the different stages throughout the life of all Jews, such as marriage, circumcisions and bar mitzvahs, as well as death rituals.

"Well-spoken and well-educated, Mrs. Beneviste gives her time to the museum to ensure that as many visitors as possible learn the story of her community," said my mother. "Starting with the story of the Romaniote Jewish community, which existed in the time of the Byzantine Empire, she noted that, 'these ancient Jewish settlements were the basis for later organized communities, which flourished throughout the Roman and Byzantine empires. These Romaniote Jews became Hellenized in speech, customs and were the majority of the Greek Jewry until the 15th century.'"

Beneviste explained further that, "By the end of the 15th century, Greece had become part of the Ottoman Empire and persecuted Jews came to Greece from western and central Europe. At the end of the 15th century, Spanish and Portuguese Jews, expelled from the Iberian Peninsula, settled in the lands of the Ottoman Empire, including Greece."

Beneviste traced the history of the Jewish community right through to the present days, said my mother. The Second World War losses to the Jewish community in modern Greece were profound – as many as 65,000 are believed to have died in the Shoah; more than 96 per cent of the Jews of Thessalonika (also spelled Salonika) died in concentration camps and, overall, nearly 87 per cent of the Jewish population of Greece was extinguished by the Nazis. A scant 5,000 Jews remain in all of Greece: 3,000 in Athens, about a 1,000 scattered throughout the country and 1,000 in Thessalonika, which was once the centre of Jewish life in Greece.

Today, the Jews in Greece live in relative peace and harmony with non-Jews, Beneviste told my parents, and the main synagogue in Athens, Beth Shalom, has a membership of several hundred families.

"The museum felt welcoming and Rosa's verbal essay – told in the manner of a storyteller – gave me a real sense of the richness of the history of this community," my mother said. "When she was speaking with us, she took us to sit directly in front of the bimah, which had been brought from the now-expired Jewish community of Patras. She sat across from us on a thin bench suited to her diminutive frame. I thought about how significant the setting was; that is, to be learning about the life and losses of the Jewish community in front of a bimah for which there was no longer a community.

"We were total strangers who had walked in off the street, but she greeted us like family and told us a history that no textbook could have set out with the same measure of intimacy," said my mother of Beneviste. "She allowed for no questions until the end, perhaps fearing that she would forget some element if she were interrupted. At the end of our time together, she asked us if we would now like to walk through the museum, to which we said yes. We went to the elevator together and rose to the top floor. My eye was drawn to a display case and when I turned around, I realized that she had left us. There was a wave of sadness that we both felt as we neither got to express our thanks to her for the gift of her time and her story nor did we have an opportunity for a picture with her."

Before parting ways, however, Beneviste – who my mother described as a Greek Dr. Ruth Westheimer, "beautifully groomed, slightly high heels, four-foot-eight, slender body, with incredible meta-phorical language skills" – recommended that my parents visit the island of Rhodes, on which are the restored remnants of the oldest synagogue in Greece, and told them about the Righteous Gentiles, including Archbishop Damaskinos, who, during the war, did what they could to save the lives of Jews.

Unfortunately, my parents did not have time to go to Rhodes, but they did visit the archibishop's statue, which was near the Plaka. The inscription reads: "Archbishop Damaskinos, during the occupation (1941-1944), assisted the people who suffered and defended their rights and freedom and opposed strongly to the persecution and Holocaust of the Greek Jews."

^TOP