Remembering the longest journey to Auschwitz – the deportation of the Jews of Rhodes decimated a small but vibrant community with centuries of Mediterranean history

In the Old Town of Rhodes, a picturesque tourist destination within the Aegean Sea, there’s a monument to a dark time within the island’s past. In the previous “Djuderia” the Jewish quarterA marble obelisk commemorates the deportation of the island's small but vibrant Sephardic Jewish community to Auschwitz-Birkenau on July 23, 1944.

The 1,700 Jews of Rhodes had the misfortune of being deported not only towards the tip of the war, when the Allied victory was almost in sight, but additionally the longest journey of each Jewish community sent to Auschwitz – a dangerous journey that lasted 24 days.

In July 2024, 80 years after the tragic deportation, scientists, government officials, community leaders and Jews from Rhodes and their descendants – often called Rhodeslís – gathered on the island, which has been a part of Greece since 1947, to per week of commemorations. I participated as a historian from Seattle – Home to a big Rhodesli community – And as Chairman the University of Washington Sephardic Studies Program.

The fate of the Jews on this distant island is a testament to the size and scope of the Holocaust: How the genocide of the Jews remained a priority of the Nazis until the tip, and the variety of Jewish cultures was decimated through the war. The Holocaust destroyed not only the Yiddish culture of Eastern Europe, but additionally the Ladin culture of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Ottoman Echoes

Like many Jewish communities within the Eastern Mediterranean, the Jews of Rhodes are Sephardic Jews whose ancestors Expelled from Spain in 1492 and settled within the Ottoman Empire.

While the Jewish presence on Rhodes dates back to antiquity, across the second century BC, the Sephardic population emerged after the island was conquered by the Ottomans in 1522. Under the Sunni Muslim rulers of the Ottoman Empire, the Jews on Rhodes paid Special taxes in exchange for maintaining their very own institutions, rabbinic traditions and the Sephardic language, often called Ladino or Judeo-Spanish.

In 1840, an economic dispute over the trade in natural sea sponges put relations between the island's communities to the test. With the support of European consuls, Greek Orthodox Christians on the island incited violence by proclaiming a blood libel: the anti-Semitic accusation that Jews were using the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes. But the Ottoman Sultan intervened, confirmed the ritual murder legend as false and restored calm.

In 1912, the Italians conquered the Dodecanese Islands, of which Rhodes is the most important. Nevertheless, the Jews maintained good relations with their Muslim neighbors. Auschwitz survivor Samuel Modiano remembers that his father spoke Turkish along with his Muslim neighbours, while relations with the local Christians remained “significantly more difficult”.

This dynamic helps to clarify why a Torah scroll within the renovated Djuderia Jewish Museum survived the Nazi occupation through the intervention of the local muftia Muslim religious leader who hid the Torah in an area mosque.

Italian Paradoxes

The lives of the island's 4,300 Jews modified radically under Italian rule, which lasted from 1912 to 1943. Italy considered Ladino a Romance language, like Italian, and due to this fact saw the Jews as natural partners in spreading “Italianness” within the region. In 1928, when Benito Mussolini got here to power, the fascist government established a crucial rabbinical seminary on Rhodes, which attracted students from all around the Mediterranean.

But although Italian fascism looked as if it would contribute to the prosperity of the Jews on the island, it also contributed to their downfall.

In 1938, Mussolini followed Adolf Hitler’s example and introduced his own anti-Semitic Racial lawsThe laws defined the Jews as a separate, inferior race, prohibited mixed marriages and excluded Jews from military, government and skilled positions, in addition to public schools.

Modiano, who played a central role within the recent commemorations, recalled the humiliation being expelled from school: “That day I lost my innocence. In the morning I woke up as a boy. In the evening I went to sleep as a Jew.”

As a part of a broader Italianization campaign, the laws also expelled Jews who had arrived on Rhodes after 1919. Many Jews on the island had previously held Ottoman nationality, and Turkey was only 10 miles away. But as a part of its own nationalization project, the Turkish Republic refused to permit them to repatriate.

In letters to relatives in Seattle Clara Barkeywhose father was originally from Aydin, Turkey, compared her family's expulsion in 1938 to the expulsion of her ancestors from Spain in 1492. Barkey eventually secured passage to Tangier, Morocco, one in every of the few places willing to simply accept Jews, as Immigration quotas in countries just like the United States.

Others joined Rhodesli diaspora communities in places like ArgentinaBelgium and what’s now the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zimbabwe.

destruction

For the 1,000 Jews who were forced to go away Rhodes within the late Nineteen Thirties, the expulsion was a blessing in disguise. The Jews who remained behind couldn’t have imagined the fate that might befall them.

In September 1943, after Italy’s give up to the Allies, German troops invaded the islandBut for ten months the Nazis took no recent anti-Jewish measures. On Rhodes, Jews were neither locked up in ghettos nor forced to wear the yellow star. The following summer, the tide of war turned in favor of the Allies.

Nevertheless, the Third Reich made plans to increase the “final solution” to the DodecaneseOn July 20, 1944, SS officers drove a lot of the island's Jews right into a makeshift concentration camp. The pretext was an identity check, a trick that sealed their fate. But the local Turkish consul, Selahattin Ulkümenmanaged to exclude greater than 40 Jews who were, or based on his statement, residents of neutral Türkiye.

The SS crammed the island's Jews into the holds of three ships used to move livestock. On the strategy to the Greek mainland, the ships stopped to choose up 85 Jews from the island of Kos and continued on to the port of Athens. With little food and water, several prisoners needed to died through the week at seaand their bodies were thrown overboard.

In Athens, the Rhodeslis followed the trail previously taken by the 60,000 Jews of Greece – including the most important Sephardic Jewish community within the countryin Salonika. As the transport from Rhodes approached Auschwitz, the USA bombed nearby chemical plants and refineries – but never the railways, gas chambers or crematoriaOnly 150 Rhodeslis survived Auschwitz.

The decision of the Third Reich to liquidate the Jews of Rhodes so late within the war underscores the extent of the Hitler’s fixation on the mechanized mass murder of the Jewsdespite the price of the war effort. The Nazis used their dwindling resources to deport small Jewish communities on the sting of Europewhilst the British bombed Rhodesand although the Nazi occupation would collapse inside six weeks. Survivor Stella Levi recalled eerily: “It would have been easier to murder us all here.”

The 2024 commemorations on Rhodes honored the victims of the Holocaust – today there aren’t any Jews with pre-war roots living on the island. But in addition they honored the Traditions, Kitchen And Spiritkept alive under Rhodeslis within the Diaspora who made the pilgrimage to their home island – a “Island of Remembrance.”