In Honor of Stella Levi, a native Ladino speaker and member of Centro Primo Levi NY’s Board of Directors. Stella was born on the Island of Rhodes under Italian rule. On 23 July 1944, Stella, her immediate family, and the entire Jewish community of Rhodes (1,870 people) were deported to Auschwitz. She has long been involved with the reconstruction and preservation of Sephardic and Italian Jewish life and traditions, offering her knowledge, guidance, and dedication to the Jewish Museum of Athens, the Jewish Museum of Rhodes, the Museum of Kehilah Kedoshah Janina, and the American Sephardi Federation. Stella appears in several films, including The Longest Journey by Ruggero Gabbai, The Island of Roses by Rebecca Samonà, and
Redemption Blues by Peter Stastny. A flow of programs, publications (including the Jewish Book Council's Natan Notable Book Award-winning One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World), and projects have their source in her imagination and questions. Stella’s love and understanding of culture is very special. Stella, now in her tenth decade, is an inspiration for all of us!
Click here to dedicate a future issue in honor or memory of a loved one
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“Never Again – Remembering the Holocaust in Greece – A Book Review”
By Jim Claven, Neos Kosmos
Lena Russo, A”H, pictured here in Greece, was one of the last of 35 Holocaust survivors from Kastoria, a town that prior to the Shoah was home to 300 Sephardic families. The ASF’s “Bendichas Manos: The 7th Annual New York Ladino Day” was dedicated to her memory.
90% of Greece’s Jewish population was murdered during the Shoah. The Holocaust in Greece (Cambridge University Press, 2020), tackles the question of why so few Greek Jews survived. One main reason was the participation of local authorities and collaborators. The academic collection accordingly, “takes us through the role of these collaborators—from the leaders of the three successive collaborationist governments in Athens, through the regional and local administrations… to those who profited by the persecution of their fellow Greeks.” Difficult reading, but, “For all who say, ‘never again’, this book will be a welcome addition to their library.”
“The Holocaust of Greek Jews”
By Philip Chrysopoulos, Greek Reporter
Heroine of the Greek resistance Lela Karagianni was recognized by Yad VaShem as one of the Righteous Amongst the Nations for saving the family of Solomon Cohen before she was captured and executed by the SS in 1944.
(Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)
There are numerous stories of resistance among Greeks, including 352 people who have been designated as “Righteous Among the Nations” by Israel’s Yad VaShem Holocaust Memorial Museum. That list includes the mayor of the island city of Zakynthos, Loukas Carrer, and the local bishop, Chrysostomos, who refused to comply with a Nazi demand to prepare, “a list of every single one of the Jewish people who lived on the island.” The communal leaders instead presented an alternative list with only two names: their own.
“Hymns from Auschwitz”
By Dana Arschin, Fox 5
Montage of Michael Assael, his score, and the New Manhattan Sinfonietta, Carnegie Hall, NYC, 2022
"It’s music symbolizing unspeakable pain, loss and death during the Holocaust…and up until now, this music had never been heard in public..." so begins an article about a concert a lifetime in the making. Talented musician and Sephardi Shoah survivor Michel Assael, A”H—one of only ~19% of Greek Jews overall and a tragically even smaller percentage of Salonica’s (Thessaloniki’s) Jewish community who weren’t murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust—wrote a symphonic poem, Auschwitz. 75 years after being composed and sixteen years after Assael's death, the piece had its world première at Carnegie Hall in 2022 thanks to the tireless efforts of Sephardic leader (including on the ASF's Board of Directors) Dr. Joe Halio and renowned Turkish-Sephardi pianist Renan Koen. "'It’s an important piece of history because the Holocaust about Greek survivors is always overlooked, the Sephardic community is a minority in the mainstream Jewish community and no one talks about the Sephardic Holocaust, it’s an overlooked area in holocaust studies,'" said Halio.
The ASF proudly supported the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County & New Manhattan Sinfonietta in honoring Martin Elias, Distinguished ASF Board Member and Executive Producer of the New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival, with this historic performance.
“The unspoken Holocaust”
By Jennifer Lipman, The Jewish Chronicle
Liberated Libyan Jewish Holocaust survivors returning to Tripoli, August-September 1945
(Photo courtesy of Yad VaShem)
Yossi Sucary remembers as a child growing up in Israel telling one of his teachers about his family’s suffering at the hands of the Nazis in Libya. The teacher refused to believe him, “‘She said ‘you’re mistaken. Only the European Jews were in the Holocaust.’” Perceptions are beginning to change, however, thanks in part to Sucary’s prize-winning novel, Benghazi - Bergen-Belsen, now part of Israel’s public school curriculum.
Feature: Woman Finds Family Her Grandmother Saved From Nazis, Loses Relatives To Violence
By NBC News
Yvette Manessis and Megyn Kelly
(Photo courtesy of NBC News)
During World War II, the entire Greek island community of Ereikoussa risked their lives to save a single Jewish family. Yvette Manessis Corporon’s grandmother was among those who protected the family, a story she tells in her book, Something Beautiful Happened: A Story of Survival and Courage. Tragically, two of Corporon’s extended family members, neither of them Jewish, were murdered in 2016 by a neo-Nazi who opened fire on a JCC in Kansas City. In this interview with Megyn Kelly, Corporon shares the mind-bending details of her family’s bravery and recent tragedy.
“When the Mob Came for the Jews of Baghdad”
By Joseph Samuels, The Wall Street Journal
Joseph Samuels’ interview entitled “We are the Jews who escaped Iraq,” 14 March 2017
(Screenshot courtesy of CUFI’s The Mizrahi Project/Youtube)
Joseph Samuels is an LA-based real estate developer who grew up Iraq. He is also the author of Beyond the Rivers of Babylon: My journey of optimism and resilience in a turbulent century. Samuels was only ten years old during the 1941 Islamist-Nazi anti-Jewish pogrom known as the Farhud. It was terrifying, “‘Not wanting to appear weak to my older brothers, I cried myself to sleep in silence.’” Fear of a second Farhud drove Samuels to leave the country in 1949. Today? As Samuels tells it, “‘A journalist based in Basra, Iraq, recently asked me, ‘Would you like to come back to Iraq, if things got better?’ ‘No,’ I replied. ‘I am glad and grateful to be out of Iraq alive, and feel fortunate and blessed to enjoy freedom in one of the best countries in the world, the United States of America.’”
Listen to Joseph Samuels’ CBS radio interview with John Batchelor and Malcolm Hoenlein: Escape from the Farhud, 1941-1948 and his Hans Heilbronner Lecture at the University of New Hampshire: “The Farhud: When the Mob Came After the Jews of Bagdad.” Click here to learn more about the Farhud.
Special Feature: ASF IJE’s “The Forgotten Part of WWII”
In this episode of ASF Institute of Jewish Experience’s New Works Wednesdays Dr. Reeva Spector Simon discusses her groundbreaking book, The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa: The Impact of World War II (Routledge, 2020). Writing in the Middle East Forum, Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, Bernard Lewis Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, described Simon’s work as “the first country-by-country account” of how WWII impacted a million Jews, “from Morocco to Iran.” Simon’s comprehensive perspective creates, along the way, the context for understanding crucial aspects of modern Middle Eastern history, “Italian planes bombed Haifa in July and September 1940. In June 1941, the Luftwaffe bombed Tel Aviv, Jaffa, and Haifa. As German troops approached, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, called on the Arabs to kill Egypt’s 80,000 Jews. The Farhud pogrom in Baghdad killed 200 Jews in 1941.” Simon, an ASF IJE Advisor, served as Associate Director of the Middle East Institute (Columbia University) and a Professor of History (Yeshiva University). She is the author of Iraq Between the Two World Wars and co-editor of The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times.
The conversation is moderated by Dr. Ronnie Perellis, Chief Rabbi Dr. Isaac Abraham and Jelena Rachel Alcalay Associate Professor of Sephardic Studies at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies and Director of The Rabbi Arthur Schneier Program for International Affairs at Yeshiva University.
“Analyzing and criticizing the dangers of ‘Mein Kampf’ with newly annotated edition”
By Lisa Deaderick, The San Diego Union-Tribune
Historiciser le mal: une édition critique de Mein Kampf [Historicizing Evil: A Critical Edition of Mein Kampf]
(Photo courtesy of Fayard)
Should Mein Kampf be republished in a critical edition? The American Sephardi Federation’s Executive Director, Jason Guberman, makes the case that, “dangerous ideas, if they are ever to be defeated, must be questioned, analyzed and criticized, not dismissed or censored.” What’s more, “There has been no carry-over from censorship to greater civility. On the contrary, canceling rather than refuting insidious ideas just allows them to become more contagious and deadly.” As for the argument that publishing an anti-Semitic text is liable to “inspire, or increase” Jew-hatred, Guberman responds, “[T]he real concern is that a critical edition, especially in Arabic, is decades overdue.” Mein Kampf helped instigate the Farhud and today “is spread by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian regime” who “ensur[e] it never goes out of print and is the basis for an endless stream of articles, textbooks, films and other media.”
“North Africa and the Holocaust”
By Michael Berenbaum, The Jewish Journal
Cover of The Holocaust and North Africa
(Photo courtesy of Stanford University Press)
The editing duo of Professors Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein have put together a book, The Holocaust and North Africa (Stanford University Press, 2018), that explores what happened to the Jews of North Africa during WWII, when colonialism and the Holocaust collided. The devastation of European Jewry has, understandably, caused scholars to often overlook the North African dimension of the Shoah. Nevertheless, “This book is an overdue and most necessary offering that should force a reconsideration of the issue.”
In commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2020, the American Sephardi Federation co-sponsored Moment Magazine’s conversation with Professors Sarah Abrevaya Stein and Aomar Boum. Click here to watch.
“The unsung Jewish resistance of the Holocaust”
By Eliezer Hayon, Ynet
A scene from The Night of Fools, which screened on Israel’s Channel One and at the 20th New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival
400 members of the Algerian underground, almost all of them Jews, played an essential role in the Allied liberation of Algiers during World War II. Why is their heroism so unheralded? According to Rami Kimchi, the Israeli director of The Night of Fools,—a new film dedicated to telling the story of the Jewish-Algerian resistance—“The Jews here in Israel focused on the Ashkenazi Holocaust - the Holocaust in Europe,” while the “Holocaust of the Jews of North Africa” was forgotten.
See a Diarna Geo-Museum exhibit on Holocaust-era sites in Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia.
“Telling Holocaust Stories—in Ladino”
By Margarita Gokun Silver, Tablet
Annette Cabelli, 92, a survivor of Auschwiz, Sefarad Center, Madrid, Spain (Photo courtesy of Olmo Calvo/El Mundo)
Annette Cabelli is a Holocaust survivor from Salonica, Greece in her nineties. Deported to Auschwitz at the age of 17, she survived three concentration camps and three death marches. She only began speaking about her experiences after a Holocaust documentary was released in France in 1956, “‘Before that, we couldn’t talk because people didn’t believe us.’” Today she tells her story, in Ladino, to Spanish-speaking audiences.
“The Jewish Community of Arta, Greece – Fables, Memories and the Holocaust”
By Elias Messinas, The Jerusalem Post
Defaced Holocaust Memorial, Arta, Greece, 28 March 2017
(Photo courtesy of the Former Jewish Community of Arta – Greece/Facebook)
The story of Romaniote Jewry, the Jews who lived in Greece since ancient times, began in the southern Greek town of Arta. But the community of Arta was devastated by the Holocaust, and the last Jew left in 1959. Today, the history of Arta’s Jews is preserved by Theocharis Vadivoulis, “a local of Arta, lawyer and dedicated researcher,” who you’ll find at a local church. Why is Theocharis so dedicated to preserving the memory of Arta’s Jews? “My grandmother… never told stories… However, there was one thing that she kept telling me about… The painful memory of losing her Jewish friends, and their deserted homes after their deportation: the deserted streets in the Jewish quarter, the silence, the open windows swaying in the wind, the closed shutters, the emptiness… Their loss was unbearable.”
Exclusively available at The ASF’s Sephardi Shop:
The Synagogues of Greece: A Study of Synagogues in Macedonia and Thrace by Elias V. Messinas, an English edition published by The American Sephardi Federation
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Please also support the ASF with a generous, tax-deductible contribution so we can continue to cultivate and advocate, preserve and promote, as well as educate and empower!
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The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa: The Impact of World War II
By Professor Reva Spector Simon
Incorporating published and archival material, this volume fills an important gap in the history of the Jewish experience during World War II, describing how the war affected Jews living along the southern rim of the Mediterranean and the Levant, from Morocco to Iran.
Surviving the Nazi slaughter did not mean that Jews living in the Middle East and North Africa were unaffected by the war: there was constant anti-Semitic propaganda and general economic deprivation; communities were bombed; and Jews suffered because of the anti-Semitic Vichy regulations that left them unemployed, homeless, and subject to forced labor and deportation to labor camps.
Covering the entire Middle East and North Africa region, this book on World War II is a key resource for students, scholars, and general readers interested in Jewish history, World War II, and Middle East history.
Birkenau (Auschwitz II) How 72,000 Greek Jews Perished
By Albert Menache, M.D.
Memoirs of An Eyewitness; NUMBER 124454
This is the story of the destruction of the Balkan Sephardic Jewish Community by the Nazis in WWII. Written by the President of the Jewish Community of Salonica, Greece, it is the earliest published account by a survivor. Written while still in the concentration camp on smuggled paper, it has been out of print since the first edition appeared in 1947.
This new edition has been updated with historical documents, photographs, and notes on the restoration of Jewish life in Greece after the war.
Watch Dr. Joe Halio speak about “Dr. Albert Menache & The Holocaust in Salonika”
A Liter of Soup and Sixty Grams of Bread: The Diary of Prisoner Number 109565
By Heinz Salvator Kounio
Translated by Marcia Haddad Ikonomopoulos
On 15 March 1943 the first Greek transport left from Salonika bound for Auschwitz. Their arrival on 20 March was the beginning of the end of Greek Jewry. Among the 2,800 deported Jews was the 15-year old Heinz Kouinio. Wrenched abruptly from a comfortable upper-middle class home, Heinz found himself immersed in the horrors of the Nazi Concentration Camps. Heinz, along with his mother, father, and sister, would ultimately survive. What kept him going was his fervent wish that his murdered brethren would be remembered and that their killers would be punished. He had to survive to bear witness to that unbelievable horror. Heinz kept a diary in which he recorded his experiences. That diary is the basis of this book.
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Upcoming Events or Opportunities
The Omni-American Future Project, Combat Antisemitism Movement, Jazz Leadership Project, and American Sephardi Federation present
The Blues and Resilience: A Concert in Honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day
This cultural-educational experience with live music featuring acclaimed Israeli Jazz musician (and ASF Pomegranate Award recipient) Itamar Borochov.
Tuesday, 30 January at 6:30PM EST
In-Person @the Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street, New York City
Sign-up Now!
Tickets: $20
Proceeds will benefit Holocaust education programs
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The Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society invites submissions:
2024 Biennial Scholars Conference on American Jewish History
Revisiting Jewish New York: Centers and Peripheries
Returning to the Center for Jewish History for the first time since 2016 after the Covid-19 pandemic shifted 2020’s conference fully online, next year’s conference seeks to reconsider New York City as a central locus of Jewish life in the United States and around the world.
We hope to interrogate the specific amalgam of “Jewish” and “New York” in varied ways, such as its inner diversities, its boundaries and limits, and its relationship with populations beyond its borders.
12-14 May, 2024
@the Center for Jewish History
*Submissions from now until January 31st.
Sign-up Now!
2024 Biennial Conference Co-Chairs: Hasia Diner and Leah Garrett
Conference Committee Members: Allan Amanik, Hadas Binyamini, Jonathan Karp, Eddy Portnoy
Tickets will go on sale in early 2024. All attendees must also register or renew their Academic Council membership in order to attend..