As we enter the commemoration of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day, we take a moment to reflect on all the vile and tragic events that have befallen our people and our families. Along with the Exodus, the Destruction of the First Temple and the Spanish Expulsion in 1492, the Holocaust altered the face of the Jewish world in unimaginable ways.
However, we must be careful not to wallow so deeply in our loss that we forget the heroic acts performed to rescue us.
I would like to share one of those heroic acts that saved an entire Greek Jewish community, a story related by Leora Goldberg about the Jewish community of the Island of Zakynthos.
Zakynthos is one of many communities in Greece that had been home to a Jewish community since Roman times. In fact, they referred to themselves as Romani rather than Sephardim. But the spread of the Nazi terror threatened to put an end to Zakynthos’ Jewish community, as it had done to so many others in Greece.
On September 9, 1943, the governor of the German occupation, a man named Berenz, asked the mayor, Loukas Karrer, for a list of all the Jews on the island. After discussing this demand with Bishop Chrysostomos, the mayor and bishop decided to go together to meet with the governor the next day.
When Berenz demanded the list, the bishop told him that while these Jews were not Christians, they had lived there in peace for hundreds of years. They had never bothered anyone. They were Greeks just like other Greeks, and it would offend all the residents of Zakynthos if they were to leave.
The governor still insisted, so the bishop handed over the list. It had only two names on it…his and Mayor Karrer. He also declared that the Jews of Zakynthos were under his authority and he would write Hitler himself informing him so.
The German occupation never got the list and left Zakynthos in October, 1944. The city’s 275 Jews had remained hidden and protected by the citizens of Zakynthos, its bishop and its mayor.
Eventually the Jewish community of Zakynthos disappeared, not because of the Nazis, but because the Jews had moved either to Athens or to Israel. The last Jew in Zakynthos, Ermandos Mordos, died in March of 1982.
In 1978 Yad Vashem honored the bishop and mayor with the title of “Righteous of the Nations”, and plaques honoring them are still found at the site of one of the two synagogues on the island.
Yom HaShoah – we must never forget. And we must never forget to give thanks.
B’Shalom
Rabbi Stanley Halpern