In Ottoman times, Salonika was an important Jewish center. The city was saturated with Jewish customs and rhythms for centuries. The prominence of Jews in economic life was such that the port was closed on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays. A Greek city since 1912, it ranked among the most important Sephardi centers. With a Jewish population of nearly sixty thousand, the city had no fewer than sixty synagogues and midrashim (small prayer halls), and numerous Jewish institutions were scattered throughout the historic city center and its environs. 

Tragedies struck the city throughout the centuries: epidemics, earthquakes, conquests, but mostly fires, which devastated the Jewish quarters many times and changed the location of the Jewish settlement. Though painful, the natural disasters were not nearly as lethal as the man-made catastrophe, the Holocaust, which altered Jewish Salonika forever. 

This exhibition is a photographic album that fosuses on the changes after three catastrophes that changed the Jewish community of Salonika, during the last century: the fires of 1890 and 1917, and the Holocaust. In each case, destruction, suffering and pain were followed by reconstruction, renewal and hope. The exhibition features rare archival photographs of the Jews of Salonika, the synagogues and communal institutions, architectural drawings and reconstruction models of the synagogues, and maps that identify the location of the synagogues prior to the Second World War. 

The exhibition was curated by Greek-born Israeli architect Dr. Elias V. Messinas, an expert on the history and architecture of the synagogues of Greece, and curator of similar exhibitions in Greece and Israel. 

For information, please contact: Press Office, The Embassy of Greece, Washington, DC. Tel.: (202) 332-2727.