Jewish Community of Thessaloniki

Exhibition "WITH THEIR OWN WORDS":
GLIMPSES OF JEWISH LIFE IN THESSALONIKI BEFORE THE HOLOCAUST
A documentary exhibition of the archives of the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki.

The aim of this exhibition is to use documents and other archival materials to highlight a cross-section of Jewish communal life in Thessaloniki prior to the destruction wrought by the Holocaust. Another aim is to let the words of our parents, grandparents and great grandparents tell us their stories, their successes, and their struggles as Jews in Thessaloniki. For those fifty thousand who perished in the Nazi death camps, it is these words-their words-that in some cases are the only traces that remind us of their existence.

“With their own words” also alludes to Judeo-Spanish, the historic language of the Jewish community of Thessaloniki; the language in which for generations communal administrative processes, everyday correspondence, business transactions, newspapers and books appeared. To talk about the Jews of Thessaloniki “with their own words” is not to talk about an island of Judeo-Spanish culture in Southeast Europe, but rather of participants in a larger Judeo-Spanish community stretching across the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean. But Thessaloniki was not just any participant in this larger Judeo-Spanish community; rather, Thessaloniki was the mother community: the “Jerusalem of the Balkans,” or, in Judeo-Spanish, La Madre de Yisrael (the mother of Israel). This image of the Jewish community of Thessaloniki

“With their own words” also speaks about change: about a Jewish community in transition from the largest ethnic group in multinational Ottoman Selanik to a minority in Greek Thessaloniki.

During this process, the words themselves of the members of the Jewish community change and so do the languages in which these words are written. This part of the story is one of struggle as the Jewish community seeks to adapt to life in Greece while at the same time to maintain its Jewish identity and continue to function as a traditional Jewish community.

Among the various manifestations of this transition, the use of the Greek language becomes one way through which the Jewish community finds its new place in Thessaloniki between the world wars. All the while, however, the Judeo-Spanish language is not abandoned despite further competition from French and Hebrew; rather, it continues to be a defining characteristic of the community not only until the deportations to the Nazi death camps, but even until today.