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When the grand vizier Syavush Pasha came to Sarajevo in 1581, the local representatives of the Sublime Porte asked him to separate the Jews from the rest of the population, for “they lit too many fires and made too much noise”. Syavush Pasha ordered the construction of communitarian housing for the Jews, with a courtyard and synagogue. The Velika Avlija (Old Temple Synagogue) ...
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The Jewish community of Voivodina’s capital was, until World War II, one of the most prosperous in all Yugoslavia. Present since the city was founded in the late seventeenth century and 4,000 members strong before its extermination, the community was keen on building structures to rival those of other ethnic groups in this majority-Hungarian Catholic city (it belonged to the ...
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Within the Venetian outer walls of ancient Candia, the old Jewish quarter is found right beside the seafront. Four synagogues once stood in this district; its perimeter today is delimited by Venizelou, Makariou, and Giamalki streets. The last, still active at the start of the Second World War, was bombed. The Hotel Xenia has been built upon its ruins. Several neighboring Venetianhouses were ...
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The oldest synagogue in Canea, , lives again after a half century of neglect. Raised from its ruins by Nicholas Stavroulakis, former director and founder of the Jewish Museum of Athens, it was rededicated in October 1999. It should be noted that its reopening was violently protested by the island’s prefect. Etz Hayyim appears to have been the former Venetian oratory of Santa Caterina, ...
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The Jews have a unique and turbulent history on Crete, one of the most important islands in the Mediterranean. Under the Byzantine Empire, Cretan Jews believed the hour of the final redemption had rung: in 430 C.E., a false messiah, the rabbi Moses, promised to lead them all to Jerusalem; they then threw themselves en masse into the raging sea and drowned. Several centuries later, the hand of ...
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In the fourteenth century, a Jewish community settled behind the ramparts of Rhodes erected by the knights of Saint John after their flight from the Holy Land. These Jews had the strange destiny of finding common ground with the Crusaders in their war against the Ottomans, only to be forced by Grand Master Pierre d’Aubusson to convert to Christianity or flee. The waves of expulsion from ...
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Visiting the site in Delos is quite easy throughout the summer, the island being accessible by boat from nearby Mykonos. If one place attests to the presence of a Jewish community in Ancient Greece, it is certainly that of Delos, an arid island of the Cyclades. The existence of Jews here is referred to in the Book of Maccabees, while Flavius Josephus mentions them as well. Too tiny to flex ...
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In the late 12th century, Jewish traveler Benjamin de Tudela encountered a lone Jew on Corfu. Three centuries later, however, Jews had become so numerous here that the Venetians, then in control of this much-coveted, strategically important Adriatic island, had them confined to ghettos. A local Christian legend, which, strangely spoke of Judas as a native of Corfu, made Jewish life here even ...
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When David Ben Gurion moved to Thessaloníki to learn Turkish in 1910, he was surprised to discover a city like none found in “Eretz Israel”: The Shabbat marked the day of rest here, and even the dockworkers were Jewish. He was advised not to admit he was Ashkenazic (all the procurers were). Jewish and Sephardic, Thessaloníki had been called “Mother of ...
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3,2,1… go! Set off on a marathon walk through time, 2500 years to be precise, to discover the monuments of Athens and its Jewish cultural heritage. Starting with the Panathenaic Stadium. An ancient stadium dating back to 330 BC, it was renovated in 1896 to host the first Olympic Games of the modern era, with 28,400 spectators cheering the athletes. Then, cross over. Either to the right, ...
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Sumptuous and decadent, immense and frenetic, Istanbul is “the world in one city”, as it is often described by Western travelers overwhelmed by the city’s splendor. The skyline of Istanbul is punctuated by hundreds of minarets, majestic onion domes, and bell towers. “An aged hand covered with rings held out toward Europe”, according to Jean Cocteau, the great ...
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Twenty-five hundred members strong before the war, the Jewish community of Ruse, on the banks of the Danube, was reduced to barely 200 people after mass departures to Israel in the late 1940s. Since the fall of Communism, however, the Shalom organization has attempted to revitalize and return the here to service, the last one built in Bulgaria in 1927. The Sephardic Synagogue, which dates ...
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The synagogue here has been transformed into an art gallery. Built at the turn of the century following plans of the Italian architect Ricardo Toscani, during the 1960s it was completely remade into an exhibition space for some 2500 works by contemporary Bulgarian painters, as well as for a collection of old icons. A terrorist attack was carried out against Israeli tourists in Burgas in 2012.
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The Zion Synagogue dates from the nineteenth century. It is still active, but only a small minority of 300 to 400 Jewish inhabitants are still practicing. Restored in 2003, the synagogue is adorned with a delightful Venetian-glass chandelier and a richly decorated dome. In the surrounding area, traces of what was once a sizable Jewish quarter can still be found today. This includes Stars of ...
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Some of the richest Sephardic families in Europe made their fortune in the small city of Samokov, located about thirty-seven miles south of Sofia. A branch of the Apollo family, which originated in Vienna, founded a veritable empire here, with ventures in metallurgy, tanning, weaving, banking, and real estate. The beautiful synagogue, today a national historic monument, along with a number of ...
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The first Jews probably settled in Timisoara in the 17th century. Gravestones were found in the city dating from that era. At the end of the conflict between the Austrians and the Turks, a Jewish Community life quickly developed. Both Sephardic and Ashkenazic. Places of worship were created but also cultural establishments as well as schools. Facing regular waves of anti-Semitism, the results ...
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At the northern border of Transylvania lies Sighet Marmatiei, unquestionably the region’s most original and charming little city, where Romanian, Hungarian, Roma and Ruthenian populations all coexist. Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel was born in this Hasidic township. Jews settled in this town, located in the region of Maramures, in the 17th century. The Jewish population ...
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Cluj is today Transylvania’s most important city. The Jewish presence became significant here only starting in the late eighteenth century. The community, divided between those of Orthodox faith and Reformists, was uniformly annihilated in Auschwitz following imprisonment within the city’s ghetto. Only a few dozen Jews live in Cluj today, the rare survivors of the Shoah here ...
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North of Wallachia and west of Moldavia, at the center of the Carpathian arc, stretches Transylvania -the land “beyond the mountains”, also called Erdely in Hungarian and Siebenburggen (The Seven Cities) in German. Dacian warriors resided here until the year 107, when they were subdued by Trajan’s Roman legions, including the Thirteenth Gemina recruited in Judaea. In ...
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The city of lasi, Moldavia’s capital since the sixteenth century, is surrounded by little towns of pastel-colored houses and whitewashed, thatched cottages. Long ago, places like Bivolari, Harlau, Podul Iloaei, and Târgu-Frumos were abandoned by their Jewish inhabitants. In the 1920s, it was lasi that contained the eastern region’s most important Jewish community. Populated by ...
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The city of Galati has been a major Romanian trade hub since the seventeenth century. In 1868, it was the theater for acts of vandalism against Jews following accusations of their having committed ritual murders. The imposing “Synagogue of Artisans” was the only temple to remain standing out of the twenty-nine that were active here during the 1930s. Built in 1875, the ...
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Jewish Bucharest has almost completely disappeared. Of a population estimated at 158,000 souls in 1948, there remain only 2,000 people today. Living across the four corners of the capital, they are doubtlessly too old or in too precarious an economic situation to contemplate emigration. The old Jewish quarter The old Jewish quarter was located near the Unirei (Union) Square on the other side ...
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Although its underground petroleum resources are today largely exhausted, Wallachia remains the country’s economic center. This region was first dominated by Hungary, but in 1330 it fell under Ottoman influence. A number of Jews expelled from Hungary in the mid-fifteenth century settled on the Wallachian slopes of the Carpathians, and were followed, after 1492, by those expelled from ...
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Jews began settling in Wlodawa in the seventeenth century. By the turn of the twentieth century, they numbered 3,670 (66% of the population), then 4,200 (67%) in 1921, and 5,650 (75%) in 1939. The Germans created a ghetto to which they deported 800 Jews from Kraków and 1,000 from Vienna, before exterminating them all in the camp near Sobibór, a mile or two from here in the forest, beside the ...
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In this region, the town of Wlodawa boasts a particularly interesting Baroque synagogue, built at the end of the 18th century. Nearby is the Sobibor camp, where many victims of the Holocaust were massacred.
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The city of Jozefów possesses a beautiful late-seventeenth century synagogue. It can be seen almost immediately upon arriving in the village, on the right and set back a bit in relation to the city center and the intersection of Górnicza and Krótka streets. It was rebuilt in the 1990s and converted into a public library with one distinctive feature: upstairs, a doctors office and hotel are ...
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Szczebrzeszyn is today a small, tranquil city, with a Catholic church and city hall downtown. A jewish community sprang up in Szczebrzeszyn in the sixteenth century, while the synagogue was built here in the seventeenth century. In the nineteenth century, the community experienced important growth, jumping from 1,083 members (31% of the population) in 1827 to 2450 (44%) in 1897; it also ...
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Zamosc is a magnificent example from the Polish Renaissance era. Built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Italian architects in the service of Kings Sigismund and Casimir, the city offers a distinctive architectural unity, with its wide-stepped city hall, central square lined with beautiful Renaissance and Baroque mansions, and its crisscrossing of old, narrow streets arranged ...
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If one stop along the road from Lublin to Warsaw is a must, it is in the city of Kazimierz Dolny on the Vistula, first because it is a tourist city, with old houses, a magnificent rynek lined with Renaissance or Baroque facades, a large church, and castle, but also because it has been marked by an important Jewish presence, of which there remain a few remarkable traces, most notably the ...
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An important city in eastern Poland, Lublin has preserved a very picturesque old quarter that offers a glimpse of what life was like here in the seventeenth century, with a city hall in the middle of the rynek, a Dominican church, fortifications, and various city gates. Lublin also features a castle surrounded by a park plucked straight out of a tale from The Thousand and One Nights. The ...
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