Ioannina before the Holocaust
About the Jewish Community
At the beginning of the 20th century the district of Ioannina had some half a million residents, of whom a third were Moslem and 5,000 were Jewish. During this time the Jews of the city lived in two quarters – one inside the city’s fortress, and one which lay outside of its walls. Most of the Jews of Ioannina were traveling merchants, laborers and shop clerks, and some of them were store owners and importers. Ioannina was a gateway for products which were sold on to other cities in the Epirus region. Other Jews worked in industry, and in the production of kosher wine and cheeses.
With the end of the Balkan Wars, which were fought between 1912 – 1913, Ioannina passed from Ottoman to Greek control. Jewish soldiers from Ioannina were among the Greek soldiers who fell in battle. During the fighting the city was cut off from the rest of the country, and as a result its residents suffered deprivation and hunger.
In 1923 new legislation was passed according to which deserters from the Greek army would be expelled. This law was considered antisemitic, as it was only enacted in the case of Jewish soldiers; it led to several Jewish families being deported from Ioannina. A year later the Greek government passed a law which forbade commerce on Sundays, creating difficulties for many of the Jewish merchants. In 1922 the Jews of Ioannina wrote to a rabbi in Jerusalem, telling him that they would be unable to provide financial aid due to their impoverished situation. “Our community is suffering and our treasury is empty, and indeed we find ourselves forced to turn to other, more affluent, communities to help fill our coffers.”
Many charitable associations operated in Ioannina, among them The Chevra Kadisha (The Jewish Burial Society), Chevrat Bikur Cholim (visiting the sick), and Kupat Nosei Yetomot (assisting orphan girls to marry). Leon Matsas, a philanthropist from Ioannina, established a cultural club to which the educated Jewish residents belonged as well as a home for the aged. Matsas later also established “Beit Yeshuah and Rachil”, named after Yeshua Solomon and his wife Rachil Solomon, who returned from New York to Ioannina. During the Holocaust Yeshua and Rachil were deported to Auschwitz and murdered.
In 1904 Kol Yisrael Haverim established a school for boys and a school for girls. The boys’ school had 420 students, only half of whom paid for their own tuition. The languages of instruction in the school were Greek, Hebrew, Turkish and French. The girls’ school was located within the fortress walls, and had 160 students. The financial support from KIH and from the small number of affluent Jews from Ioannina was used to pay for the poorer students’ tuition, and to provide clothing and food to students in need as well. A number of Jewish youths attended a local school for the arts, as well as a school that provided vocational training (which was established by the Italian government).
There were a number of Zionist associations as well as a Zionist newspaper in Ioannina.. Many Jews left the city and moved to Athens. Others immigrated to the United States and Israel. This immigration in which many young people took part, brought the community to the brink of bankruptcy.
Emigrants from Ioannina became active in religious and public matters in their new countries of destination. For example, in 1924 emigrants from Ioannina founded the Beit Avraham and Ohel Sara synagogue in the Machane Yehuda neighborhood in Jerusalem. In 1932 Jewish women from Ioannina founded a Jewish women’s association in New York.
Most of the Jews of Ioannina were traditional, and the city had two synagogues – the Kahal Kadosh Yashan (the Old Holy Community, or the “Inner Synagogue”), which exists to this day, and the Kahal Kadosh Hadash (the New Holy Community, or “Outer Synagogue”). Each of these synagogues was adjacent to another synagogue. The old synagogue was located in the Jewish quarter within the city walls. The community did not have an appointed rabbi, but only an “acting rabbi” who was a local merchant. Most of the community’s intellectuals and religious figures studied in Salonika.
The Jews of Ioannina had their own style of lamentations and eulogies, as well as their own ketubah, which was influenced by an early ketubah from the Land of Israel. The versions used in Ioannina were those of the Romaniotes Jews, whose traditions were distinct from the Sephardic Jewish traditions (in Ladino) common to most of the Jewish communities in Greece.
The community in Ioannina had other unique traditions, among them the celebration of Rosh Chodesh Adar (the beginning of the Hebrew month of Adar). The children of the community would go from door to door among the Jewish houses, collecting sweets and fruits. Some of the children’s gifts were later passed on to their teachers, the custodians of their schools, the gabais of the synagogues (a managerial role in the synagogue, whose holder helps organize the running of the services), and to the rabbis. The Jews of Ioannina also had a custom whereby they would hang silver plaques on the parochet, (the ornamental curtain covering the front of the Torah Ark) in order to commemorate people or events. A collection of such plaques from Ioannina is on display at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
During the interwar period some 30 Jewish families from Sicily also lived in Ioannina. They held religious services in their own synagogue.