For 2,000 years and until the Holocaust, descendants of Jews who left Israel or were taken into slavery after the destruction of the second Temple lived in Ioannina, now only a few dozen remain to daven in their distinct style and preserve their memory
Greece’s oldest Auschwitz survivor has died
On December 1, Greece’s oldest Auschwitz survivor, Esther Cohen, died at the age of 96. In 1944, as a young woman, she was deported from her hometown of Ioannina to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp along with her parents and six siblings. Apart from one sister, her entire family died at the camp.
Deportation of the Jews of Ioannina, documented by the Nazi Propaganda Company, March 25, 1944 (Bundesarchiv, Image 101I-179-1575-02 / Wetzel / CC-BY-SA 3.0).
The northern Greek city of Ioannina in the Epirus region had a strong Jewish community, at one time numbering up to 6,000, with a history reaching back to the Byzantine period in the 9th century. For centuries, Jews, Christians and Muslims lived together in Ioannina.
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