Yesterday we visited the cliff monasteries of Meteora and then traveled to Trikala and Larisa to meet members of the local Jewish communities and see their synagogues. Both these communities and the one in Volos where we will visit today are Romaniote Jewish. These communities have been a part of the fabric of central Greece for over 1500 years. They speak Greek, the spoken Greek, and were accepted as Greek by the Christian communities in which they were sharing geographic space.
Surviving the Holocaust in the countryside took a few factors in any country in Europe. You had to have access to rural mountainous regions and the assistance from the local Christian community. The Jewish leadership also had to speak to a policy of survival and resistance – to flee the cities and towns and hide. In this central region of Greece you had these conditions met. Rabbis told their communities to flee to the mountains to hide and seek the assistance of the partisans. Those that did so had a better chance of survival. These Jews all spoke Greek, unlike the Sephardic Jews in Thessaloniki who spoke a version of ancient Spanish called Ladino.
Today the Rabbi we met in Larisa and the woman in Trikala are Greek first and religiously Jewish. In their conversations with us, the discuss this notion of ‘Greekness.’ Their parents were survivors because they were aided by the local communities. They did not speak of the stories of survival but of a continued Jewish community as part of their Greek identity. At the end of the day their Greek identity the theme of the message.
At the end of our meeting in Larisa wet met Avram, a school teacher who instructs in the local prison. The conversation turned to the immediate economic crisis faced Greece. His salary has been slashed by 40%. A university graduate that decides to go into the teaching profession right now has a minimum of €350 a month. How can one survive on less than $500?
From all we have spoke to in Greece, a common thread in the economic discussion has been of a collective responsibility for the current crisis and of a shared hardships that are to come.