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Lessons For Living: Ode on a Grecian journey

There’s a small tree and a little poem, easy to overlook, but a pity to miss, as you walk alongside the ancient city walls of the old town of Rhodes Island, Greece.

Written in Greek it reads:
You the passer by, who you love me
let the others admire the castles and listen to me:
My fate has been marked by a ravine singer
and the trembling in my foliage, it's a song 
the deep voice of life.
For you a sweet memory
but l, a tiny tree,
I need it for faith, to grow taller and taller
and stare beyond these walls.
(Fotos Varelis)

Meteora

 

In many ways this poem sums up a remarkable Grecian trip that Melbourne educator Paul Forgasz recently led for a group of Australian Jews.
We indeed admired antique castles and tombs, statues and objects of delicacy and beauty. There were the majestic statues of the museums of Athens and beyond, the peerless horseman at the Delphi museum every vein pulsing with movement; he is still in motion. We travelled into the mountain ranges to see the Meteora monasteries perched on unimaginable eagles lairs; temples in the air stimulating the soul to soar. Meteors of the mountains. Who could fail to remember the glorious golden crowns of father of Alexander the Great, King Philip 2 and his Queen, not to mention their astonishingly well preserved stately burial tomb in Vergina? (The Royal Tomb was only discovered unplundered in 1977).And who wouldn’t remember the Greek arena on Rhodes Island with its stately stadium ( special stone seats for the notables). I won’t forget the oratorium,a boutique mini auditorium alongside the main arena built for the eloquent speakers of the day -I’m looking for an architect to design one for my home! Like countless others we will hold the memory of the eternal Acropolis -not just as a breakfast backdrop at our hotel-but as an immense presence brooding over Athens.We will long sigh at the memory of the tiny and so finely detailed and intricate ancient figurines carved on a piece of ivory two by two in the breathtaking museum in Vergina.
 

Crown of King Philip, father of Alexander The Great at Vergina

 

In Greece you cannot fail to be humbled by the sweep of history-everywhere busts of the young Alexander the Great striding across the mountains and the centuries, surely fired by the memory of his powerful father and his formidable teacher Aristotle himself. They knew a thing or two these ancients, things we had to rediscover and uncover in the layers of sand and century.

Now I understand better how the brilliant polyglot and conqueror bedazzled our rabbis and sages of antiquity so they claimed him as a saviour of sorts. Alexander became a popular name for Jewish boys and Josephus the historian is rapturous about an ostensible meeting between Alexander and the Jewish high priest, Jaddua, when he visited Jerusalem.

But for all this reverent history, we were also here to learn of Jewish life in Greece and a fate often marked by ‘ravines and trembling in the foliage. ‘The deep ravines of Jewish persecution and suffering across time, but more recently the fear and trembling of the Romaniote and Sephardi Jewish population seeking refuge in the sparse foliage from their Nazi persecutors . Everywhere the haunting absence of this oldest of Jewish communities ,the  Romaniote that could trace their origins back over 2000 years ago . Now just a few Romaniote and Sephardie remnants ( most Greek Sephardim are descendants of those escaping the Inquisition and expulsion from Spain in 1492)in beautifully desolate or desultory shuls in Volos and Ioannina . In Athens on Shabbat the Torah reader among the few people who gathered was the lone Romaniote.The proud Sephardic community is fading away…

Greece is becoming Judenrein (the term used by the Nazis to denote their attempt to purge all Jews from Europe)despite the Herculean efforts of some amazing individuals and inspiring leaders. The tortured stone figures of the Shoah/Holocaust  monuments in Thessaloniki, Larrisa and Volos, the six simple slabs in Athens, cry out in their aching simplicity and the empathetic spirit of their non-Jewish creators.

But what especially tore at me and my fellow travellers was the beautiful little restored wooden shul of Veroai on the shores of the Tripotamos River. This exquisitely simple and colourful structure located in the intact Barbouta or Jewish quarter built in the mid nineteenth century was an easy place to round up the remaining 460 Jews including many children. The tiny desks housed in the shul today are a sorrowful reminder of their murder. The poignant letters of current Veroain schoolchildren written to these children are like the astonishing 2019 Thread of Memory project of the town a moving tribute by some of the Greeks who are now recognising the proud and singular contribution of their former Jewish neighbours and citizens. The project featured a march that included the unfurling of a 3 km red thread by students and participants beginning in front of the synagogue in the former Jewish quarter and ending at the railway station where the Jews were sent to Auschwitz. A thread of blood, a delicate Ariadne thread of Greek myth left dangling in the labyrinth of human destructiveness..
 

Holocaust Memorial in Thessaloniki

Being here was humbling reminder that the holocaust or Shoah of Poland and Lithuania, Germany and Hungary, was only part of the inventory of horror. There was also the Shoah of Greece and Italy, Portugal and Denmark…Thessaloniki had its Black Sabbath and its deportations and the destruction of almost the entire community. The numbers were of course nowhere near the losses of Eastern Europe but the proportion was even higher with over 90 percent of Greek Jewry decimated.

Being here with the magic of Forgasz was a privilege for the rich evocation of the culture and the traditions of this country, for the challenges and existential issues that Paul so skilfully wove. We learnt about  the travels and epistles of the New Testamental Paul in Greece seeking to win over Jews and pagans ;we travelled with the Old Testamental Paul speaking his truth and pricking holes into our inflated understanding of who the Greeks and Maccabees actually were .

Despite the depressing presence of absence , we were simply astounded by the determination and resilience of the Jewish community leaders we met across the country. We were deeply moved by our non-Jewish Greek guide, her respect for the Jewish roots of this community and passion for promoting the current generation .She sends her own children to the Jewish primary school of Thessaloniki.

For all this, the simple song the little tree holds onto, that fragile deep voice of life is diminishing and apparently disappearing. I would like to believe that this ancient community won’t become just another sweet memory of our bitter past. That somehow it will find another way, to restore the faith, to grow taller and taller and stare beyond these hard walls of time …

Shabbat Shalom 
Rabbi Ralph