:: Simon Marks Museum of the History of Thessalonikean Jewry

The museum belongs to the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki and is in the area of the Modiano Market, which was the centre of the Jewish community from the time when the first Spanish Jews settled in the city until after the Second World War. It opened in March 1997, and its purpose is to keep the memory of Thessaloniki’s Jewish community alive.

One wing of the museum displays copies of exhibits in the permanent exhibition titled Thessaloniki: The Metropolis of Sephardic Jewry, which has been open in the Beth Lohamei Agetaoth Kibbutz in Israel since 1933 and gives a detailed account of the history and activity of the Jews of Thessaloniki (their contribution to the city’s economic development, their public welfare institutions, their publishing activity, and the development of the Zionist movement) from when the city was founded in 315 bc and particularly from 1492, when 15,000–20,000 Spanish Sephardi Jews settled in Thessaloniki, to the Holocaust of the city’s Jews during the German Occupation.

The other wing houses an exhibition of photographs relating to the Holocaust, which replicates the exhibition in the Auschwitz Institute in Brussels. Texts and photographs recount the Nazis’ rise to power, the German policy of racism, life in the concentration camps, the annihilation of the Jews in the gas chambers and crematoria, the outbreaks of resistance, and the liberation of the remaining prisoners by the Allied Forces in 1945.

Apart from the photographs, there is also documentation brought back by the few Thessalonikean Jews who returned from the concentration camps. This includes such shocking items as two pieces of soap, one green, one white, made from the body fat of slain Jews, a rusty metal identity plate bearing the number 118968, a bent spoon which Heinz Kounio brought back with him, and a camp inmate’s uniform.