80th Year Deportation Commemoration of the Jews of Rhodes/Kos to Auschwitz

“Eightieth Year Commemoration Activities of Deportation of Jews of Rhodes and Kos to Auschwitz July 23, 1944” by Yitzchak Kerem

From Tuesday July 16 until July 22, 2024 hundreds of Jews of Rhodian origin gathered on the Island of Rhodes for a landmark world reunion and commemoration of the deportation of over 1600  Jews from Rhodes and over a hundred from Kos on July 23-24, 1944 en-route to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Daily there were 2-3 mass events of seminars, lectures, films, concerts, Sephardic cooking lessons, memorial ceremonies and commemorations. Due to the immense heat the activities were in the morning and the evening to enable participants in between to rest, go to the beach or tour the Old City of Rhodes or its island sites.

Two main events were the reopening of the reconstructed 4 room Museum of the Jews of Rhodes financed, organized and collected decades by the persistent and fatigueless soft-spoken Aron Hassan, a second generation Rhodian from Los Angeles, and the film about 94 year-old Rhodian Auschwitz survivor of Milan, Italy, Sam Modiano. Modiano has a poignant story and spoke candidly in Greek, his third language, for the benefit of the local population, and since most participants did not speak Judeo-Spanish or Italian.

A day conference featured mostly younger scholars like Prof. Devin Nar who founded Sephardic studies at the Univ. of Washington in Seattle and Dr. Hannah Pressman who grew up in Virginia of Rhodian familial background; both now of Seattle; as well as some Greek Gentile musicologists, linguists,  and filmmakers on Rhodian and Greek Jewry. Pressman reconnected to her Sephardic identity through her Rhodian grandmothers artifacts and European serving dishes and tablecloths. Historian Anthony MacElliot of Ireland fell in love with Rhodian Jewry, has researched its Holocaust period, and retired on the island, and organized the events.

Photo of Prof. Devin Nar, Dr. Hannah Pressman, and Judeo-Spanish singer Sarah Aroeste (compliments of Hannah Pressman) 

Enthusiastic formal delegations from Seattle from the Rhodian Ezra Bessarot synagogue and the recently revived Queens, NY, Sephardic Brotherhood showed their fervor and Sephardic identity and culture. A large component of the attendees who were first generation Rhodian Jews who migrated to the Belgian Congo (Zaire) and Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) in the 1920s and 1930s or descendants of the first pioneers from the at the beginning of the 20^th century from Ottoman Rhodes enduring political and economic turmoil.

Further Rhodian fervor was shown by the retiree Isaac Habib born in Elizabethville (Lubumbashi), Congo, who like most of the former Rhodians relocated to the Seapoint suburb of Capetown, South Africa in the 70s and 80s during Congo nationalist violence during the Mobutu period. Some 13 years ago Isaac settled in Rhodes, leads Jewish tours and researches the Rhodian Jewish past through its physical buildings, past streets, houses, synagogues, midrashim (religious study halls), schools, and past pre-WWII rabbinical college. The film “Behind These Walls: Journey to the Past” of Isaac’s return to Rhodes and uncovering its Jewish physical past made a great impression on the conference attendees.

Confused? Other participants were half-Ashkenazi or Sephardi Rhodian Jews with southern USA accents from Atlanta, former Rhodian South Africans coming from Sydney, or Canada, Israelis from Rhodian Rhodesian background, or Rhodian Buenos Aires Jews with both Sephardic and Castilian accents. There was a multi-generational Rhodian contingent from Italy mostly with survivor or pre/post WWII backgrounds in Italy.

Similar to Ashkenazim who lived under German, Prussian, Hungarian, Austro-Hungarian, Polish, Soviet, Romanian or Ukrainian rule, Rhodes had its diverse regimes and cultures. Rhodes has a classical Greek and  Roman history, as well as a distinct past under the regime of the Knights, and followed by the Byzantines, Ottomans, Italians (1911-1943), short fatal German Nazi regime, liberation by the British in 1945,  and the current Greek regime since 1946. Rhodes had eminent rabbis from the Israel, Franco, and Codron families, and noted philanthropists from the banking Alhadeff families as well as from the Menashe and Leon families. An unknown historical episode is that the Rhodian rabbis ransomed the young Rabbi Nahman of Bratslov from captivity when he got on the wrong ship to Rhodes from Eretz-Israel after his half-year stint in the Holy Land, (where he was in Safed for only a bit more than a week) and shortly afterward returned to Ukraine and became a renown inspirational Hassidic figure and rebbe.

In 1923 according to the Lausanne Agreement, local Jewish Rhodians received Italian citizenship including those who migrated from nearby Turkish Asia Minor. Under the 1938 Italian fascist racial laws those 2,000 Asia Minor Jewish immigrants lost their citizenship and had a half-a-year to leave the island. Most went to the international zone in Tangiers, Morocco, or to the Rhodian community in Elizabethville, Congo. Those remaining, some 2000, would mostly be annihilated in Auschwitz upon arrival in August 1944.

Sami Modiano, survivor and Holocaust educator and Auschwitz trip survivor guide, moved the audience each time he spoke. He was expelled from Italian school at age 8 due to the anti-Jewish racial laws in 1938, lost his mother in 1941 of illness, and was deported on June 23, 1944 with his 16 year old sister and father. In Birkenau he daily would visit his father in a nearby barrack and saw him lose his hope, health and strength within a month. He searched the electric fence  for days at night for his sister. The signaled to each other in sign signals, and when he threw her a piece of bread in a handkerchief over the barbed-wire fence, she threw it back with his piece and her piece; she always provided for him after the death of her mother. From Auschwitz he walked several days in the death march and was liberated by the Russians and was a weak walking corpse he was strengthened by a Russian nurse who saved him while others in the infirmary withered to their deaths. For years in Italy Sammy was traumatized. Twenty years ago he decided to talk and was a beacon for youth delegations to Auschwitz. His personal message was it is palatable to ear my story, it has been overly painful for me to live with these constant memories, The film made about him “Samuel Modiano: The Mission: From Rhodes to Auschwitz” interviewed Sami in Greek and his strength and message was an inspiration for many local Greek young people who came to see the film and meet him.

94 year old Rhodian Auschwitz survivor Sami Modiano and the Mufti Hasan Kara-Ali of Rhodes, Holocaust commemoration ceremony Rhodes, July 19, 2024. Photo taken by Yitzchak Kerem

The 85 year old Pentcho Revisionist illegal immigration boat departing from Bratislava on the Danube River with 500 Jews fleeing from Slovakia and Austria in May 1940 was not allowed to refuel or land in Lesbos by the Greek authorities, went to Pireaus, and came to Rhodes where the Italians provisioned  them, but forced them to leave after several days. At sea on October 9, 1940 the boiler blew up and the boat split in two. Five of the survivors took a lifeboat, were caught in a storm, rescued by a British ship,  and ended up in Alexandria, Egypt. The Greek authorities were notified and on 18/19 October the Italians brought the passengers to Rhodes, where were housed in the soccer stadium and later moved to the San Giovanni Camp in Rhodes. They were assisted greatly by the Sephardic Jewish community of Rhodes. In January 1942 they were transferred to the Ferramonti internment camp in southern Italy in Calabria and were transferred to Eretz-Israel in June 1944. Two-four went on to migrate the United States.

The Italian authorities need a tenor for the opera and hired a Jews from the Pentcho with the surname Fhan. He stayed on Rhodes with his family and unfortunately they were arrested and deported to Auschwitz with the rest of Rhodian Jewry in the summer of 1944. One son survived Auschwitz and the death march and migrated to Eretz-Israel. Seven elderly Jews from Pentcho died in Rhodes and are buried in the Jewish cemetery and there is a memorial for them there and they were mentioned in the Holocaust ceremony at the Jewish cemetery.

Unable to defeat the Germans by land and sea in 1943, the British bombings of February 2 ,1944 and April 8, 1944 killed dozens of Rhodian Jews including the two Angel sisters of Samuel Angel of South Africa and Bella Angel Restis of Athens, caretaker of the Rhodian Jewish community,  who attended the ceremonies.

100 Rhodian women transferred from Auschwitz to Bergen Belsen comprised most of the Rhodian Holocaust survivors. Only several dozen males survived.

Another poignant event was a Holocaust memorial ceremony at the Rhodian Jewish new cemetery outside the city  with its section of historic rabbis, pre-Holocaust graves, and more modern gravestones for the reinterred. The old Jewish cemetery surrounding the Old City walls was torn down in 1938 by Italian fascist governor de Vecchi in order to set up rose gardens. Attendees could locate their family graves and read their inscriptions with the help of numerous rabbis and experts in attendance.

The diverse group of rabbis and Sephardic educators and leaders included Romaniote (Byzantine Greek Jewish religious ethnicity) Rabbi Gabriel Negrin of Athens, Rabbi Benjy Owen of Seattle, of Rhodian familial origin and synagogue affiliation and heritage, David Behar of Seattle and scion of grandfather Rhodian Haham Rev. David Behar of Seattle, Rabbi David Benshloush of the Rhodian Ezra Bessarot Synagogue in Seattle, and visiting Nachshon Rodrigues Pereira of the break away Spanish and Portuguese “Bendigamos” congregation of Amstelveen outside of Amsterdam.

Vivacious and talented Sara Aroeste of Massachusetts sang two Judeo-Spanish songs at the Holocaust commemoration ceremony at the Kal Shalom synagogue – Arvoles (“trees”) a Judeo-Spanish song of the grueling Auschwitz experience and Hatikva in Judeo-Spanish.

Attending the ceremonies were Andrew Surmani of Los Angeles with his wife and sister. His father Eliezer and his sister were Rhodian Auschwitz survivors. He is a scion to numerous Rhodian Surmani rabbis and paytanim (religious poets) with a branch of a Surmani paytan in Argentina.  In 1941 Eliezer’s younger 13 year-old brother Moshe by himself and without money fled the island by boat to Turkey and continued on to Cyprus and then reached Eretz-Israel; where he studied at the Kfar Haroaeh Yeshiva and fell in battle in the 1948 War of Israel Independence in Gush Etzion in a religious company of the Palmach. For years there was no known relative to say kaddish for Moshe z”l. It took many decades for the family in California to learn the whereabouts of Moshe’s short life and tragic death in battle.  A film was made several decades ago about Moshe’s impressive escape and heroic valor.

46 Jews of Turkish origin or citizenship were rescued by 29 year old consul Salahattin Ulkumen who came to the Chemenlik Ottoman Air Force base, where all the Jews were interned, to demand from the Nazi commanders the release of his Turkish subjects. The community Torah scrolls were saved by the local Mufti in the Holocaust; another unusual local Muslim feat and twist in the local Jewish history. The local mufti, who heads 300 local Muslims, also attended some of the ceremonies in his ceremonial garb.

The last day was dedicated to a trip to the nearby island of Kos for ceremonies at the cemetery and refurbished synagogue/museum. Some hundred plus Jews were deported to Auschwitz from the island along with the Jews of Rhodes. Menashe family surviving sisters from Israel came with a daughter, granddaughters and Athenian Jewish nephews. They were saved as two of six Jewish Turkish subjects in Kos.

The Menashe family saved by 29 year-old Turkish consul Salahattin Ulkumen. Photo taken by Yitzchak Kerem

Two Menashe sisters of Kos who were released from the Haidari internment camp  in Piraeus as Turkish subjects before deportation to Auschwitz. Their brother Sami Menashe of Milan recently initiated a Holocaust memorial for Rhodian Jewry at the local Holocaust center in Milan.

The event was organized by local Jewish community acting caretaker president Claudia Restis Breitbart, director Carmen Cohen; and office worker Magda Georgiopoulou who contended with the many logistic challenges and arrangements.