Ágnes Keleti (left, photo courtesy of the Maccabiah archive) and Harold Abrahams (courtesy of IOC Olympic Museum)
The setting and timing for a phone interview for this story were coincidentally exquisite.
It took place on Sunday, July 14, less than two weeks before the start of the Paris Olympics on July 26. A television screen during the interview showed the field at Berlin’s Olympiastadion ahead of that evening’s Euro 2024 football (soccer) championship game.
The stadium was the scene in 1936 of some of the Olympics’ most powerful moments. It was where American runner Jesse Owens, a black man, earned four gold medals and thereby punctured the Aryan-racial-superiority doctrine of German chancellor Adolf Hitler, who was in attendance.
It also is where a painful snub occurred. Owens’ teammates on the United States’ 100-meter relay squad, Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, both Jewish, were removed by American track coach Dean Cromwell. Glickman and others believed that he did so to appease Hitler.
Marty Glickman: The Life of an American Jewish Sports Legend, by Jeffrey S. Gurock, New York: Washington Mews Books, an imprint of New York University Press – Glickman embarked on a successful career as a sportscaster following his time as an athlete
The greatest tragedy in Olympics history, of course, occurred elsewhere in Germany, when Palestinian terrorists in Munich kidnapped and murdered 11 members of Israel’s delegation in 1972.
In recent decades, the Olympics’ most accomplished Jewish athletes have been Americans and Israelis. Previously, the greatest Jewish Olympians came from throughout Europe, especially the USSR. In all, Jewish Olympic medalists have represented 16 European countries, counting Russia and Ukraine following the Soviet Union’s disintegration.
Harold Abrahams pictured a century ago during the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, photo – IOC Olympic Museum, Switzerland
This will be Paris’ third Summer Olympics and its first since 1924. That year’s winner in the Olympics’ premier event, the 100-meter dash, was Harold Abrahams, a British Jew. He was one of the protagonists of the 1981 Academy Award-winning feature film, Chariots of Fire.
Alexandre Lippmann, perhaps France’s greatest Jewish athlete, photo – Comité National Olympique et Sportif Français
Perhaps France’s greatest Jewish athlete was fencer Alexander Lippmann, who earned two golds, two silvers and a bronze in the Olympics of 1908, 1920 and 1924. Another outstanding French fencer was Yves Dreyfus, who competed in three Olympics and earned bronze medals in 1956 and 1964.
Among the first Jewish medalists were German gymnasts Alfred Flatow and his cousin Gustav Felix Flatow, who combined for five gold medals and a silver medal at Athens in 1896 in the first modern Olympics. Attila Pettschauer won two golds and a silver for Hungary in fencing in 1928 and 1932. Five Jewish members of the Netherlands’ women’s gymnastics team earned golds in 1928. The Flatows, Pettschauer and the Dutch quintet — and their coach — were among Olympians murdered during the Shoah.
The 1928 gold medal-winning Dutch Olympic gymnastics team, which included five Jewish members: Helena-Lea Nordheim, Ans Polak, Estella-Stella Agsteribbe, Judikje-Judik Simons and Elka de Levie. The team coach, Gerrit Kleerekoper, was also Jewish.
A discussion of the greatest Jewish Olympians must include (along with American swimmers Mark Spitz and Dara Torres) Hungarian gymnast Ágnes Keleti, who in 1952 and 1956 earned ten medals, five of them gold. Keleti, now 103 years old, survived the Shoah in Budapest, defected to Australia during the ’56 Games in Melbourne and the next year moved to Israel, where she lived for many years.
Ágnes Keleti won ten Olympic medals in gymnastics, photo from the Maccabiah Archive
Stuart Lustigman, a member of the executive committee of the Israel-based International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame (IJSHF), remembers two English Jews who made an impression on him growing up in London: fencer Allan Jay, who competed in five Olympics, earning two silver medals in 1960; and runner David Segal, a two-time Olympian who earned a bronze in the 4×100 relay, also in 1960.
“I was in awe of their success,” Lustigman said.
Not only athletes have made their marks on the Olympics. Ludwig Guttmann was a German-Jewish physician who fled to England before World War II and established what became the Paralympic Games: athletic competitions for those with serious injuries and conditions. The Paralympics are held in host cities following each Olympics’ conclusion. (They will begin in Paris on August 28.)
Guttmann presenting a gold medal to Tony South at the 1968 Summer Paralympics in Tel Aviv, Israel, courtesy of the Australian Paralympic Committee
Ferenc Kemeny, a Hungarian Jew, was a co-founder of the International Olympic Committee and helped to revive the Olympic movement with the Athens Games in 1896.
Despite Kemeny’s accomplishments — he was among those who established the Hungarian Olympic Committee — he became “a target of frequent anti-Semitism from other HOC members,” according to the IJSHF’s website. “These attacks eventually resulted in his resignation in 1907, as Hungary’s IOC representative and from sports life itself.”
Kemeny and his wife would commit suicide in 1944 after being arrested by Hungary’s fascist Arrow Cross party, the website states.
Asked where European Jews most prominently made their mark in sports, Jed Margolis, IJSHF’s chairman, mentioned German and Austrian athletes who excelled early in the 20th Century despite enduring anti-Jewish discrimination in their hometowns’ sports federations.
Hakoah in England, a 1923 booklet documenting the Hakoah Vienna football team’s tour of England, written by M.J. Leuthe and published by Verlag des Sportklub Hakoah-Wien
The label seen here on the left – “Jewish Cultural Reconstruction”, indicates that the above booklet was at one point confiscated by the Nazi authorities before later being retrieved by Allied forces. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish books confiscated by the Nazis eventually reached the National Library of Israel, as in this case. More on this here.
Vienna’s Hakoah Sports Club was one of the Jewish communal organizations that filled the athletic void then. It was best known for producing a top Jewish football team that played internationally — as well as Olympians in many other sports.
Members of the Hakoah Vienna football team that toured England. Note the Stars of David on the uniforms. From the Hakoah in Englandbooklet by M.J. Leuthe and published by Verlag des Sportklub Hakoah-Wien, 1923
As to the Paris Games, Margolis offered this prediction: “We will come home with some jewelry.”
"Prise de la Bastille" (The Taking of the Bastille), by an anonymous artist, circa 1789-1791, musée de la Révolution française
Jews in France typically don’t mark The 14th of July differently than do their fellow citizens.
But just as the holiday — known in France by its calendar date and as Fête Nationale Française (French National Holiday), and elsewhere as Bastille Day — is cause for celebration, it holds meaning for the country’s Jews because it launched the process leading to attaining equal rights in the country for the first time.
That was no small matter, given that France had expelled its Jews in 1394 — and later, when Jews legally returned, only tolerated them.
The term “Bastille Day” is shorthand for a crowd’s storming of Paris’s Bastille fortress in 1789 that started the French Revolution and ultimately overthrew the monarchy. The Bastille riot was “the beginning of the process, but more significant for Jews were 1791 and 1905” — when all French Jews were granted full citizenship and when France instituted a separation between church and state, respectively — said Raphael Hadas-Lebel, a Parisian Jew retired from a distinguished career in national government, including as an advisor to three prime ministers.
The National Library of Israel’s collections contain an eight-page document of an address delivered on August 3, 1789, to the National Constituent Assembly, or legislative body, requesting legal decrees and equal rights for Jews living in Lunéville and Sarreguemines, towns in the northeast province of Lorraine. A digital scan of the document can be found on the NLI website, here.
The document, printed that year, came from secular officials of the areas around those towns, home to a relatively large Jewish population. It demonstrated support for the request submitted by Ashkenazi Jews for full legal equality.
The document and its address were “not unique,” at the time, with other municipalities submitting such requests — but were important “because it reinforced the notion that there was significant support for the demands of the Jews for legal equality,” said Gerard Leval, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who authored a 2021 book published by Hebrew Union College Press, Lobbying for Equality: Jacques Godard and the Struggle for Jewish Civil Rights During the French Revolution.
Godard, a Catholic, represented municipalities in their motions. He had previously represented other minorities, including a slave seeking freedom and a Protestant defending his property rights. Godard died at 29 in 1791 following a brief illness, possibly typhoid fever. He’d just been elected to France’s first national legislature and taken his oath of office.
Leval’s book includes additional references to municipalities’ shows of support that Godard solicited on behalf of his clients.
Godard’s petitions “would have a decisive effect on the struggle to destroy one of the oldest prejudices infecting the Western world, a struggle to fulfill for the Ashkenazi Jewish community of France its deep-seated desire to become fully integrated into French society while remaining faithful to its religious practices,” the book states.
Approximately 40,000 Jews lived in France at the dawn of the revolution. They were second-class citizens, their residential and professional options limited. The assembly in January 1790 granted Sephardi Jews full citizenship and in September 1791 extended citizenship to Ashkenazi Jews.
“The French Revolution was a very seminal event for Jews that provided opportunities they didn’t have before. … [It] really broke down old prejudices and barriers in ways that hadn’t been seen before,” Leval said in a phone interview.
“Jews for the first time were given full legal rights. That was a pivotal moment for Jews — not to be considered a nation apart, but a people who happened to have a different religion and were citizens like anyone else.”
The revolution in France was part of the enlightenment then advancing across Europe, and the spread of liberty was influenced by the American revolution that began in 1776, he said.
Leval is Jewish, was raised in France by French-Jewish parents, speaks French fluently and visits the country several times each year. His late father moved to France from Poland in 1932, served in the French military during World War II and was wounded in battle in Belgium. His late mother’s ancestors migrated from Bohemia to eastern France in the 1630s.
In a Paris shop many years ago, Leval bought a book for which his maternal grandfather had conducted research. The book is about the emancipation of French Jews; at various points it mentioned Godard. Leval later decided to write an essay on Godard, but became convinced that he merited fuller treatment in a biography. His book includes a portrait of Godard that Leval purchased — the only image known to exist.
The book may be read on-site at the National Library of Israel. It is one of more than 2,000 books in 24 languages about the French Revolution that are available in print and digitally within the building and elsewhere.
The Library’s collections also include dozens of articles, pamphlets and archival documents relating to this subject, some going back to 1789.
Said Leval: “The 14th of July and the French Revolution are a high-water mark for Jewish equality.”
The French artist once designed something special for his friends’ garden in Washington, D.C. In turn, they provided a unique experience for congregants of a synagogue across the street.
Marc Chagall and his mosaic, "Orphée" (Chagall photo by Rudi Weissenstein, the Pri-Or PhotoHouse, the Pritzker Family National Photography Collection; "Orphée" is part of the John U. and Evelyn S. Nef Collection at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.)
For about four decades through 2009, worshippers at Kesher Israel Congregation enjoyed a cultural experience unique to Washington, D.C.
It occurred once each year, always during the afternoon break in the Yom Kippur prayer services, when they could view a massive, Marc Chagall-designed mosaic affixed to a brick wall in the shaded garden of a home across the street. The house belonged to a widow who, along with her husband, knew the famed French artist.
A portrait photo of Marc Chagall, likely taken in Paris in the early 1920s. The signature of the photographer, Henri Manuel, appears below. The Abraham Schwadron Portrait Collection at the National Library of Israel
In the early 1990s, Fran Kritz, a synagogue congregant then, saw Bible scholar Nahum Sarna studying Talmud there.
“It felt like different moments of Jewish history coming together,” she said. “You’d have thought there was no way to elevate this beautiful garden.”
The hostess, Evelyn Nef, didn’t attend the synagogue, never explained her invitation to its leadership and rarely was present during the visits. She simply sent a note before each year’s High Holy Days to extend the offer, then left the gate open on the appointed afternoon.
“She told me she was Jewish but that, at age 7, she lost all faith in religion,” said David Epstein, another congregant.
Just as Chagall created the work and presented it in 1971 as a gift to Nef and her husband, John (he died in 1989), she apparently decided to share it with the synagogue that still stands at the corner of 28th and N streets in the Georgetown neighborhood of the city’s northwest quadrant.
Chagall was born in Belarus on July 7, 1887. He spent most of his life in France and died in 1985.
A portrait photo of Marc Chagall, taken in Paris in 1925. It features a handwritten dedication by Chagall to Abraham Schwadron. The Abraham Schwadron Portrait Collection at the National Library of Israel
The shul’s Chagall-viewing tradition began shortly after word emerged about the mosaic’s installation.
Ken Horowitz might have been the first congregant to see it, and perhaps inadvertently spurred Nef to issue the annual invitation.
Horowitz was among a handful of worshippers who, after services — he remembers it being a holiday, but not which one — jumped near the property’s outer wall trying to glimpse the art.
Nef invited them into the yard.
“It was well worth it. It was a gorgeous mosaic,” said Horowitz.
Orphée by Marc Chagall, the John U. and Evelyn S. Nef Collection, the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
It certainly was imposing: 10’ x 17’ (3m x 5.2m), mounted on a 30’-high (9m) brick wall that Chagall painted gray. Chagall had told the Nefs what it depicted, according to a story she wrote in The Washington Post in 1972. The main figures at the center come from Greek mythology: Orpheus playing a lute, ringed by the Three Graces and the winged horse Pegasus. In blue at the bottom-left lies a body of water at which people stand; Nef paraphrased Chagall as saying it symbolizes European Jewish refugees like himself who escaped the Nazis’ persecution for shelter in the United States. In the bottom-right, a man in blue-green and a woman in purple sit against a tree.
Nef asked Chagall whether the couple represents her and John.
“If you like,” he replied.
Marc Chagall during a visit to Israel in 1951, photo by Rudi Weissenstein, all rights reserved to Pri-Or PhotoHouse, the Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, the National Library of Israel
The mosaic of stone and glass tiles was executed by Italian artist Lino Melano, who worked in a studio in Biot, a French village near Nice, close to Chagall’s studio in St. Paul de Vence. Melano, Chagall and Chagall’s wife Valentine visited Washington to oversee the installation of the mosaic’s 10 panels and attend a dedication ceremony where France’s ambassador spoke.
The Nefs hosted the Chagalls at least once before, in 1968. Chagall told them then he’d create art for their home to honor the couples’ friendship.
“Then, toward the end of the visit, Marc announced one morning at breakfast: ‘Nothing for the house. The house is perfect as it is. But I will do something for the garden. A mosaic,’ ” Nef wrote in the article.
The Chagalls and Nefs had vacationed together for several summers in southern France. In 1970, at his studio — “the holy of holies,” Nef wrote of visiting it — Chagall showed them a watercolor maquette, or scale model, of the mosaic.
“With some ceremony, Marc approached a large brown paper-covered rectangle on the wall,” she wrote. “After a short speech, he tore off the covering to reveal a stunning, brilliantly colored gouache design.”
Marc Chagall during a visit to Israel in 1951, photo by Rudi Weissenstein, all rights reserved to Pri-Or PhotoHouse, the Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, the National Library of Israel
Viewing the work in the Nefs’ garden was a striking experience, said Epstein, because “sometimes, when the sun hit it, the gold in it would gleam.”
“It was amazing it was in somebody’s backyard,” said American diplomat Daniel Renna, who twice saw the mosaic while attending Kesher Israel between 1995 and 2001.
John Nef, a University of Chicago economics professor, had been collecting art, including two Chagalls, by the time he befriended Chagall after inviting him to lecture at the campus in 1946. A widower, he met the divorced-and-widowed Evelyn in Washington and married her in 1964. Neither had children.
She by then was an expert on Arctic exploration (her second husband’s field), and later became a psychotherapist. She was active in Washington’s social circles.
She died in 2009, bequeathing the mosaic and other pieces, including Chagall works, to Washington’s National Gallery of Art. Conservators in 2010 painstakingly disassembled the mosaic and transported it to the museum, where it’s been displayed since 2013 in a sculpture garden. It even acquired a name, Orphée. (It was untitled during the Nefs’ ownership.)
The piece is “monumental,” among Chagall’s largest mosaics, said Harry Cooper, the National Gallery’s curator of modern art. Its acquisition “filled a major gap” in the museum’s Chagall holdings, he said.
Orphée by Marc Chagall, the John U. and Evelyn S. Nef Collection, the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
“The flying figures is pure Chagall. The flowing colors, beautiful colors — that’s Chagall,” Cooper said. “He gives people this sense of magic, freedom, flight — all these things we really need … as an escape from daily life. It’s a bit of the Mediterranean or Atlantic in our sculpture garden, whatever beautiful spot you want to think about.”
A portrait of Marc Chagall drawn by fellow artist Hermann Struck. The portrait was donated to the National Library by Struck himself in 1930. The Abraham Schwadron Portrait Collection at the National Library of Israel
Kesher Israel congregants who enjoyed the Chagall mosaic on long-ago Yom Kippur afternoons praise Nef’s gesture today.
“It was a wonderful experience. I remember thinking how generous it was of her to allow a select public to come in,” said Jerusalem resident Ruth Frank, who saw the mosaic, in either the late 1980s or early 1990s, while attending the synagogue.
“It was a lovely place to spend the [Yom Kippur] break,” said Edith Gelfand, of Florida, who also viewed the mosaic once during her years in Washington.
Said Kritz: “It was a lovely invitation by this woman. To me, it became a holy opportunity.”
On March 22, 1946, the Sephardic Jewish newspaper Hed HaMizrach (“Echo of the East”) published a pained Hebrew letter written by Haim Mizrachi (1901-1969), a resident of the island of Corfu and a Revisionist Zionist activist, parts of whose personal archive are kept at the National Library of Israel. The Jerusalem weekly didn’t make the letter a front-page affair, instead tucking it in between pages 9 and 10 of a 12-page publication, but the content remains difficult to stomach.
The beginning of the Hed HaMizrach article. March 22, 1946. Click here for the full article.
In the text he wrote and published, Mizrachi mourned his community’s destruction in the Holocaust. He told of how on June 9, 1944, the Nazis, with the aid of Greek police officers, arrested most of the Jews on the island of Corfu and sent them to the Birkenau death camp. Of some 1,700 Jews on the island, only 200 survived – 80 of them managing to escape the Nazis altogether and 120 surviving the camps. The rest were murdered.
Mizrachi issued a desperate plea for aid to help for the remnant of Corfu Jewry – the orphans, widows, sick, and unemployed. They needed clothes, blankets, funds and assistance in rebuilding the one remaining synagogue, which was left “half-demolished.”
Mizrachi added that of the 200 surviving Jews, 30 had already made Aliyah to the Land of Israel and many more intended to follow “for they do not see any hope of rearranging their lives in the exile”. Thus did an ancient Jewish community, which had survived for over 700 years, come to an end. The story of the Corfu Jewish community, especially its final years, is not widely known to the public, and deserves elaboration.
The island of Corfu rests in the eastern Mediterranean, near the western shores of Greece and Albania, and not far from southern Italy, occupying a militarily and economically strategic point. As such, it has been conquered many times: by the Romans, the Byzantines, the Goths, the Venetians, the Kings of Sicily, the Ottoman Empire, and the armies of Napoleon. In 1815, it was occupied by Britain, which handed it over to the Kingdom of Greece in 1864.
Jews are known to have been present in Corfu since the Middle Ages. The famous traveler Benjamin of Tudela mentions visiting the island in the 12th century and encountering a Jew named Yosef, who worked as a dyer of fabrics. Two major communities lived on the island – one composed of Romaniote Jews and the other of Italian Jews.
In a letter published in the Berlin-based Hebrew weekly HaMagid on September 24, 1891, a Corfu Jew named Halevi said the following of his community:
“…the Jews of Corfu separated here into two communities regarding matters of worshipping God. The first, the smaller of the two, includes the descendants of the first exiles from the time of the exile of the First Temple, and it has a synagogue built according to tradition in the first year of the Christian calendar, and the second community includes the children of the exiles of Spain and Neapol (Naples – N.G.), and it has three synagogues and its prayer is according to the Sephardic rite. The two communities conduct themselves according to special committees, which occasionally meet when needed in matters regarding the public.”
The community of Corfu is mentioned in rabbinic literature, and some of its pinkasim (community ledgers), piyutim (liturgical hymns) and songs have survived. In the 19th century, a Jewish printing press operated in Corfu owned by the Nachmoli family, which printed religious books.
Sefer Arvit and Hagaddah. Joseph Nachmoli Publishing, Corfu, 1876, the Rare Books Collection at the National Library of Israel
In 1864, after Corfu was handed over to Greece, local Jews were emancipated and received civil rights. They lived in relative freedom and comfort, and made great efforts to be on good terms with the majority Christian population. Nevertheless, from time to time they did suffer from both overt and covert expressions of antisemitism.
A particularly serious incident happened in 1891, when a blood libel was spread against the local Jews. The story began shortly after Passover, when a young Jewish girl named Rubina Sardas, the daughter of a tailor, went missing and was eventually found dead in a sack. A report that her father was seen with other Jews while carrying the bloody sack in the middle of the night caused a firestorm.
A rumor spread among local Christians that the girl was actually a Christian orphan named Maria Desylla, who worked for the Sardas household, and that the Jews murdered her as part of their religious rituals. Although the legal investigation produced no damning evidence against the Jews, not all the Christians were appeased and some began to attack Jewish homes and businesses. The local police made little effort to stop the rioters, and even helped to spread the rumors that the murder victim was Christian.
On May 12, 1891, the Warsaw-based Hebrew daily HaTzfirareported that
“from the day of April 14 until today the Jews of Corfu sit imprisoned in their homes as if in jail, for their windows are also closed, and none go outside out of great fear. They are forced to purchase their vital provisions early in the morning from cruel merchants who demand triple the price. Poverty has greatly increased among these miserable souls. From the day of April 23, all the houses of prayer are sealed shut. When one of the Jews died, they could not bring him to a grave but sixty hours later, and twenty soldiers went beside the bed to guard it. Commerce has ceased. The common folk’s hatred of the downtrodden has greatly increased, and the soldiers born of the city help the masses incite evil against the Jews.”
22 Jews were killed in the pogroms.
Eight days later, HaTzfira reported that in response to these events, Austria, France, and England sent warships to the area to protect their citizens. In addition, representatives of France, the Ottoman Empire, and other countries were instructed to protest the Greek government’s failure to rein in the riots, with the German central bank even warning Greece that continued unrest could harm the value of its currency.
In the end, the authorities in Athens sent military units to Corfu, driving away the rioters with gunfire. The Greek government stressed that
“the Jews have since then shared one constitution and one law with all the residents of the country. The government is very saddened by the incidents, but its heart is confident that its actions will prove to all nations that the good of all its servants under its wing is close to its heart” (HaTzfira, May 21, 1891).
The events took the Jewish world by storm. On May 21, 1891, HaMagid published an editorial full of harsh words for the Greek residents of Corfu, who made a fortune selling etrogim to the Jewish world while libeling and murdering the local Jews. The article claimed that the Jews’ main problem was their lack of any defensive force:
“And our hands are powerless to save them from their oppressors by force, for our hands do not pull back the bowstrings of heroes and we have no ships and no war stratagems to avenge the spilled blood of our brothers, for Israel is weak among the nations and its power is but in the mouth.”
Following the blood libel events, which Corfu Jews called “the evil decree,” about half of the Jews residing there left the island. Most of these were the wealthier sort, with many of them immigrating to Italy or Egypt. The Jews remaining in Corfu were mostly poor.
In the years following the “evil decree,” the lives of Corfu Jews were mostly peaceful. They loved life on the picturesque island, and author Albert Cohen, a native of Corfu, described it in longing terms in some of his works. Nata Osmo Gattegno (1923-2019), another Corfu native who survived the Holocaust, attested in her Hebrew autobiographical work From Corfu to Birkenau and Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Aked, 1999), that the community rabbi and the local Greek bishop had mutual respect for one another, with the bishop being invited to the synagogue on Jewish holidays as a guest of honor. However, when the dates of Passover and Easter fell in close proximity, tension between the two sides increased. In the week before Easter, the Greek Christians would shutter their windows, before later opening them and tossing ceramic vessels out into the street while crying out “On the heads of the Jews! On the heads of the Jews!”
On March 22, 1914, the Jerusalem daily Moriah reported on Greek rioters who smashed up the Corfu Jewish cemetery.
On April 21, 1930, Haim Mizrachi published a report in the Jerusalem daily Do’ar HaYom on another blood libel against the Jews of Corfu. Mizrachi told of how on Monday, April 7, 1930, a great panic arose in the Jewish neighborhood. The Jewish merchants who set out to sell their wares suddenly returned to their homes in fear. Local Christians had threatened to murder them in revenge for the alleged Jewish abduction of a Christian child, whose blood the Jews supposedly sought to use in a Passover ritual.
Community leaders responded by quickly appealing to the authorities to intervene. The situation became even more tense the next day, and some Jews were beaten by their Christian neighbors. The police and the Greek bishop, who Mizrachi called a “friend of the Jews,” intervened, and overnight guards and detectives were sent to protect the Jewish neighborhood. The police published a special pamphlet to calm the mob, explaining that an anonymous individual had tried to kidnap the child to sexually assault him.
Unfortunately, not all the Greek residents believed this statement and some continued with their attacks. Mizrachi claimed that the Jewish community attempted to conceal the incident so that it would not become widely known and damage Greece’s international reputation. He noted that the local educated public and press in Corfu strongly condemned the blood libels, which did not do credit to Greece.
Opening of a Hebrew report on the blood libel. Do’ar HaYom, April 21, 1930. Click here for the full article.
During the 1930s, despite expressions of nationalism and antisemitism in Greece, Jewish life in Corfu went on as normal. The community had a rabbi, synagogues, a Hevra Kadisha burial society, charity associations, mikvah ritual baths, and even an elementary school with a modern curriculum which included the study of the Greek language.
In April 1933, Haim Mizrachi was given permission to use the matza-baking floor in the community building to set up a night school for young members of the community so that they could study Judaism and Hebrew. The community leadership demanded that Mizrachi, a Zionist activist, ensure that the children were studying both Jewish and Greek history, stressing that Jews living in Greece needed to be both law-abiding Greek citizens as well as “good Jews”.
Approval by the Corfu Jewish community for Haim Mizrachi to establish a night school to study Judaism and Hebrew. April 21, 1933. From the Haim Mizrachi Collection on Revisionist Zionism in Greece. The collection has been cataloged and made accessible thanks to the kind donation of the Samis Foundation, Seattle, Washington.
The community also contained social organizations, one of which was the “Phoenix” association of Corfu Jews, founded in 1931.
Invitation to the Jewish “Phoenix” association’s ball on February 4, 1935. From the Haim Mizrachi Collection on Revisionist Zionism in Greece. The collection has been cataloged and made accessible thanks to the kind donation of the Samis Foundation, Seattle, Washington.
There was also Zionist activity, of course. A number of Zionist organizations operated on the island from the beginning of the 20th century. Haim Mizrachi himself worked on organizing Revisionist Zionist activity. As a youth in 1913, Mizrachi organized a Zionist youth group called Tikvat Zion (Zion’s Hope), which operated for a few years before disbanding. In 1924, he established another movement named Theodor Herzl, which he later merged with the Revisionist Betar movement. He kept in regular contact with the global Betar movement, and had close ties to his colleagues in Saloniki and the Land of Israel. He died in Corfu in 1969.
Haim Mizrachi. Photo courtesy of Guy Raz and the Eretz Israel Museum’s Israel Photography House
Letter from the Revisionist Zionist leadership, headed by Jabotinsky, to the Revisionist branches in Europe. June 25, 1934. This copy was sent to the Betar branch in Corfu. From the Haim Mizrachi Collection on Revisionist Zionism in Greece. The collection has been cataloged and made accessible thanks to the kind donation of the Samis Foundation, Seattle, Washington.
The community of Corfu was wiped out in the Holocaust. In the letter published in Hed HaMizrach, mentioned at the start of this article, Haim Mizrachi described his community’s last moments: In April 1941, fascist Italy conquered Corfu, but the Italians made no distinction between Jew and Gentile and took no special steps against the former.
Things took a turn for the worse in October 1943, when the Italians left and the Nazi Wehrmacht took over. SS units under the command of Jurgen Stroop – who had previously served in Poland, ruthlessly putting down the Warsaw Ghetto Rebellion – ordered the Jews to be registered in a special book and present themselves before a town official three times a week. The Jews were also burdened with a heavy tax to serve the Germans’ needs.
Wehrmacht soldiers entering Corfu, Spring 1944. Photo: German Federal Archive.
In May 1944, a delegation from the Gestapo arrived in Corfu, tasked with planning the deportation of the Jews to the death camp in Birkenau. On June 9, 1944, all Jews were concentrated in the city square, and the Nazi soldiers, with the aid of Greek policemen, herded them into the local fortress at gunpoint. At the same time, pamphlets were published on the island declaring that “Corfu has been liberated from the Jewish monster” and demanding those hiding Jews or Jewish property to immediately surrender them or be executed. Consequently, another 100 Jews hiding among their Christian neighbors were handed over to the Nazis.
Nata Osmo Gattegno attested that at the same time, Greek Christians invaded the Jewish neighborhood and looted it. The Jews were deported from Corfu in boats to the Haidari concentration camp near Athens, and from there they were very quickly sent on trains to the Birkenau death camp. Most were murdered there. Of some 1,700 Jews living in Corfu at the time of the Nazi occupation, only 200 survived.
After the Holocaust, the Greek government ordered the governor of Corfu in 1946 to return all property to the Jewish community and residents without delay, including public buildings used by the community and private property such as homes and stores (HaMashkif, January 17, 1946). But much of the property was in ruins. On the eve of the Holocaust, there were four synagogues. After the war, only one was left standing, and that barely. It was later restored by local authorities together with Jewish organizations.
The sole surviving synagogue on Corfu. Photo: Dan Lundberg
The ancient cemetery was also seriously damaged. Haim Mizrachi told of how after the war, the Greeks destroyed the cemetery’s fence, desecrated the graves, and turned it into a “place of trash and an abandoned field,” as he put it. In 1960, media outlets in Israel and around the world reported that the Jewish community in Corfu sold the cemetery land to the local authorities, which demolished it.
The Central Council of Greek Jewry denied this (Herut, January 1, 1961), explaining that in 1939, under pressure from local authorities, the community management had to give up a third of the cemetery plot for the sake of a children’s home and a hospital. The site was badly damaged during the war, most of the gravestones were destroyed, and one could only barely discern that this was indeed a cemetery.
After the war, the authorities expropriated the territory, began to level it, and even tossed bones into the sea. The community asked the authorities to stop their work, and in the end both sides reached an agreement to fence off a small part of the original cemetery and leave it alone.
In an article published in April 1978 in BaMa’arachah magazine, author David Benvenisti reported on his visit to the community of Corfu. He wrote that the old cemetery was being destroyed, the building once used for the Jewish school now stood desolate, and the few Jewish children living on the island were receiving no Jewish education. As of the 2020s, just a few dozen Jews live there; the desolate synagogue is now more a tourist attraction than anything else, and it is mostly active on weekends and holidays.
The community now uses a new location for its cemetery in place of the old one. In it one can find a memorial plaque commemorating those murdered in the Holocaust.
The Corfu Jews who made Aliyah established a monument in the cemetery of the Israeli city of Holon, which is dedicated to the memory of their brethren murdered in the Holocaust. Every year, on the 8th of the Hebrew month of Tammuz, they conduct a ceremony in memory of the ancient Corfu Jewish community, which was wiped out.
Monument in memory of Corfu’s murdered Jews, Holon Cemetery. Photo: David Shai
The Haim Mizrachi Collection at the National Library of Israel has been cataloged and made accessible thanks to the kind donation of the Samis Foundation, Seattle, Washington, dedicated to the memory of Samuel Israel. Dr. Nimrod Gaatone is the director of the Samis Project, and is responsible for handling the Haim Mizrachi Collection.
Thanks to Dr. Shay Eshel and Meytal Solomon for their help with the Greek.