The Jews Of Rhodes

Rhodes and the Holocaust is the story of “La Juderia,” the Jewish community that once lived and flourished on Rhodes Island, the largest of the twelve Dodecanese islands in the Mediterranean Sea near the coast of Turkey. While the focus of the accounts of the Holocaust has for the most part been on the Jewish populations of Eastern and Middle Europe, little seems to be known of the events that affected those communities in Greece and the surrounding Aegean Islands during that time. The population of this group was almost annihilated, reduced from a thriving community of over 80,000, to less than a 1,000 survivors, who were left to tell their stories. Among the victims of Rhodes Island were the grandmother and aunt of the author, who were killed by falling bombs, and his grandfather, who was taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp. This history tells of the deceit and inhuman treatment the entire Jewish community of Rhodes experienced during their deportation and eventual “liberation” by the Russian Army. The heart-wrenching story of the Rhodes Jewish community is told through the experiences of a thirteen-year-old boy, taken by the Nazis to Auschwitz along with his father and his eleven-year-old sister.; Most of all, Rhodes and the Holocaust makes known the story of that community’s existence and struggle for survival.

Franco was born in 1875 in Rhodes and died in 1953 in Rhodesia; he wrote these memoirs in 1947, in French, and published them in the Belgian Congo in 1952. He served as president of the Jewish community of Rhodes and Cos between 1925-36. The memoirs describe events in the community between 1936-44. The first signs of trouble for the Jews in these Italian-controlled territories appeared in 1936. In September 1938 the racial laws against the Jews were promulgated in Italy, including restrictions on the Jews of the islands, and rescinding of their Italian citizenship; these were followed by an order of expulsion. Franco travelled to Italy and then to France, where he appealed to the Alliance Israélite Universelle to assist in having the order revoked. It was revoked, but between 1938-43 ca. 2,250 Jews emigrated. There were 1,767 Jews in the islands when the Germans occupied them in September 1943. In July 1944 most of the Jews were deported to Auschwitz or for forced labor. Only 151 survived. Pp. 72-118 contain lists of the Jews of Rhodes and Cos at the time of the German occupation, including those murdered by the Nazis and those who survived.

Four peoples, each with its own culture, language, and faith, shared a small Mediterranean town named Rhodes, and experienced, each in its own way, the upheavals of war, modernity, emigration, and occupation. With the German takeover in 1943, the Holocaust in 1944, and the beginning of Greek rule in 1947, this multiethnic world perished forever. At the center of this book stands the Sephardi community: Spanish-speaking Jews who arrived in Rhodes sometime after the Spanish expulsion edict of 1492 and who remained the largest single group within the old city walls until Italy adopted German racial legislation in 1938. When Sultan Abdulhamit II ascended to the Ottoman throne in 1876, the Jews of Rhodes were among his most loyal and traditional, not to say hidebound, subjects. But, within the course of a few decades, this bastion of piety and rabbinical tradition was thoroughly transformed by French rationalism, Italian secularism, and the pressures of economic globalization. In this book, many unlikely characters come alive in the vibrant and irretrievably lost world of Rhodes: the French monks who impart universal values to provincial Turks, Greeks, and Jews * the Rhodian schoolboy lost in a Congolese jungle * the Italian general who brings sanitation to the medieval town * the Greek shepherd who knows the history of Rhodes better than any scholar * the Turkish diplomat whose wife was murdered by the Nazis and then risked his life to save Jews from the SS. These are just some of the stories related directly to the author, who combines journalism with scholarship in the recreation of a unique cultural microcosm.

This new account of the Holocaust in Greece elaborates on the involvement of Christian society in the persecution of Jews.

Memoirs of a Jew born in 1926 in Rhodes. Relates the introduction of the Italian racial laws in 1938-39, and how the community adjusted to the restrictions. In spring 1944 the Nazis occupied the island. The Jews were transported by ship to Athens, where they encountered Nazi brutality in the Haidary detention camp. From there they were deported to Auschwitz, where most of her relatives (including her parents) were killed. Varon remained in Birkenau with her sister Stella. Gives details about life in the women's camp. When Stella became ill, Varon took her to the camp infirmary, thereby saving her from death in a selection. Varon was transferred to Dachau, and then sent on a death march to Bergen-Belsen, where she was liberated. After the war she was taken to Sweden to recover from severe illness. In 1947 she was reunited with her uncle, two brothers, and her sister in Italy. She emigrated to the U.S. in 1961. Of the 2,000 Jews who were deported from Rhodes in 1944, only 104 survived.

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