The history of the destruction of Thessaloniki’s Jewish cemetery is now well documented. Thanks to the work carried out by Greek and international historians, it is indeed established that German occupiers destroyed the immense Jewish necropolis of Thessaloniki in early December 1942 at the instigation of the local Greek authorities, including the municipality of Thessaloniki and the Governor-General of Macedonia-Thrace, who had long wanted to claim the several-hundred-acre area for themselves, claiming that it hindered the “natural” expansion of the city to the east. In the hours and days following the demolition order given by Max Merten, head of the Kommandantur of Thessaloniki, at the suggestion of local politicians, dozens of municipal employees razed the old Jewish cemetery. The tombstones, the oldest of which dated back to the 15th century, were then left to be pillaged. As a result, many funerary materials were scattered throughout parts of the former “Jerusalem of the Balkans” and are still visible today.Aside from providing a few essential reminders to help readers understand the circumstances under which the largest Jewish cemetery in the Sephardic world was destroyed during the Second World War, this draft article will not examine the history of this event, but rather the way—or more precisely, the ways—it is remembered, which is separate from the Final Solution in occupied Greece.We plan to address the following questions in our article : what were the conditions surrounding the way in which the destruction of Thessaloniki’s Jewish cemetery was remembered in post-war Greece? Why has this record been kept almost exclusively by Thessaloniki’s Jewish community for decades? Conversely, who were the non-Jewish groups who kept this history alive in Greece? What exact role did certain Thessalonian writers, such as Giorgos Ioannou (1927-1985), play in the emergence of this history at a time when this event in particular and the Holocaust in general were met with a deafening silence in Greece (late 1940s-late 1970s)? Beginning in the early 1990s, what evidence have Greek and international historians used to tell the story of the demolition of the Jewish cemetery in Thessaloniki? Finally, can it be said that the history of the destruction of a graveyard tied to the centuries-old presence of Sephardic Jews in the “Jerusalem of the Balkans” is now inscribed in the collective and/or cultural memory of the inhabitants of Thessaloniki?After a brief historical review of the circumstances that led to the destruction of the Jewish cemetery in the former “Mother of Israel,” we will look at why this event was almost entirely forgotten in post-war Greece (mid-1940s to the end of the Regime of the Colonels). We will then discuss why the event’s history gradually reemerged at the same time as the first historical works on the Holocaust were being published in Greece (1990s and 2000s). Finally, this article will explore the weight of the memory that the destruction of the old Jewish cemetery now holds among the citizens of Thessaloniki. Will the commemorative ceremonies that have been held since November 2014—at the initiative of the city’s Jewish community and Yannis Boutaris, then mayor of Thessaloniki—be enough to perpetuate its memory among the younger generations? This is the question that we will attempt at least in part to answer.
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Open Access
Jun 1, 2022
Maja Seršić 
