On September 27, 4:30-6pm, please join us for an event at St. Nicholas Catholic Cathedral celebrating the CWB Travel Seminar to Greece. For more information, click here.
Reflections by Avi Ben-Hur, CWB Director of Education
This June, our educators, students and professionals embarked upon a travel seminar to Greece, a country currently in the throes of an economic meltdown, determined to explore three primary educational trajectories: Ancient Greece, Greek Jewry and Modern Greece.
For the first, the participants visited pre-classical Mycenae, Ancient Athens, Pella (Alexander the Great’s Capital), Olympia, Delphi, the tomb of Phillip II, and fabulous archaeological museums in Athens and Salonika. The architectural wonders of 3800 year-old Mycenae fiercely competed with the spectacular 2400 year-old mosaics of Pella and the striking and opulent gold jewelry, armor and ornaments from Phillip II’s tomb. Some of the younger participants raced through the original stadium (running track) where the first Olympic Games in history took place. The Acropolis and the Parthenon Museum in Athens highlighted the contributions to western civilization that Classical Greece made millennia ago.
The participants tracked the historical trajectory of Greek Jewry starting in Ioannina, a Jewish community that had its roots in Greece in the 5th century AD. The members of Ioannina’s Jewish community spoke Greek and were integrated into Greek society. And yet, almost the entire community was decimated in the Holocaust. We found that today’s Jewish population consists of all but 35 individuals, amongst them 5 professors, and three children – the remnants of a dwindling community without prospects of future growth. We spent a memorable Kabbalat Shabbat (the weekly ceremony and meal that brings in the Sabbath in Jewish homes around the world) in Thessaloniki with 
around 70 members of the Jewish community. They sang their Sabbath hymns in Ladino, the Jewish-Spanish tongue of their ancestors that were expelled from Spain in 1492. The music was haunting, beautiful and sad, as we realized that this will likely be the last generation to sing these ancient songs. In 1939, there had been around 57.000 Jews in Thessaloniki – today there are less than 1000. 97% of Thessalonian Jews were murdered in Auschwitz.
Modern Greece with its troubles and challenges was never too far out of sight: remnants of Ottoman-Turkish Muslim rule, bus stations and other sites filled to the brim with refugees from Syria and other countries, demonstrations in front of the parliament in Athens highlighting the economic and political crisis which continues to shake Greece. Lastly, we participated in a ceremony at the European Cultural Center honoring Holocaust poems written in Greek, where we had a chance to discuss some other modern political and social issues in Greece, such as the dramatic upsurge of anti-Semitic attitudes in the Greek population as well as the rise of the neo-fascist political party Golden Dawn.
Our participants embarked home from this remarkable and haunting seminar experience, with a wealth of knowledge, food for thought, and new materials to bring back into their classrooms.
