{"id":13240,"date":"2017-11-09T09:52:20","date_gmt":"2017-11-09T07:52:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog-dev.nli.org.il\/?p=13240"},"modified":"2021-01-13T13:53:56","modified_gmt":"2021-01-13T11:53:56","slug":"thessaloniki_cemetery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blognli2026.moonsite.co.il\/en\/thessaloniki_cemetery\/","title":{"rendered":"When the Nazis Desecrated the Jewish Cemetery of Salonika"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Jewish cemetery of Salonika (also known as Thessaloniki) was an anchor of the long\u00a0standing Jewish community of that city, the largest Jewish community in Greece\u00a0before the Holocaust. The cemetery was established at the end of the 15th-century, when Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal arrived in Greece. The Jews who survived the expulsion and the long journey,\u00a0buried their dead in a plot of land that would become the Jewish cemetery of Salonika, as precious and important to the community as their synagogues.<\/p>\n

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Holocaust survivors gathered for the “Mourners’ Kaddish”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The process of expropriating the land belonging to the cemetery did not begin with the Nazis.<\/p>\n

Decades prior to the Nazi occupation, the non-Jewish residents of Salonika sought to take the land and use it for their own benefit. In 1886 a Turkish Ottoman gymnasium was established on the cemetery ground and famously, the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki was founded in 1925.\u00a0The university took\u00a0over from the gymnasium when Greece gained independence. In the 1930s the city administration officially decreed that the Jewish cemetery would be expropriated and given to the expanding Aristotle University. The plan never came into effect, but fear of demolishment motivated the Jewish community to give the university a section of unused cemetery ground.<\/p>\n

In 1941 the Nazis came, and with them, total destruction of the Jewish cemetery.<\/p>\n

By the end of 1942 cemetery grounds were confiscated by the\u00a0city’s administration, which was controlled by the Nazi\u00a0occupiers. A\u00a0Jewish family\u00a0who had\u00a0relatives buried there\u00a0and wished to have\u00a0the grave exhumed\u00a0was forced\u00a0to do so through the city administration. In December of 1942 the city pushed for a quick demolishment and within days gravestones were destroyed and human bones were gathered in unmarked piles. When the Jewish community heard of what had\u00a0occurred it was too late. All they could do was take the remains of their family members and re-bury them in a mass grave, outside the city of Salonika.<\/p>\n

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Exhumed bones and desecrated tombstones<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The desecration of the dead was part of the Nazis plan to dehumanize the living. With the destruction of the Jewish cemetery, the Germans swiftly began transporting the Jews of Salonika to the death camps.<\/p>\n

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View the entire album here<\/strong><\/a>:<\/strong><\/p>\n