Marking the 70th anniversary of the deportation of Greek Jews, JTA runs a story about the dwindling Romaniote Jewish community in Ioannina, with a focus (and picture) of the historic synagogue there. The Nazis rounded up more than 1800 Jews in Ioannina on March 25, 1944 and deported them to Auschwitz. Only 112 of the deportees survived.
Ioannina, a postcard-pretty town in northwestern Greece with a medieval fortress perched by a bright blue lake and surrounded by snow-capped mountains, once was the center of Romaniote Jewish life. Today, however, the community in Ioannina numbers fewer than 50 members, most of them elderly. The last time the community celebrated a bar mitzvah was in 2000. […]
The Romaniote Jews, neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardic, emerged from the first Jewish communities of Europe. Records indicate the first Jewish presence in Greece dating back to 300 BCE. A ruined second-century BCE synagogue on the Aegean island of Delos is believed to be the oldest discovered in the Diaspora. […]
Romaniote synagogues had a unique layout. They had their own religious traditions and prayer book, the Mahzor Romania. Much of the worship was in Yevanic, and the tunes, including for reading the Torah, were heavily influenced by Byzantine music.
The synagogue in Ioannina is a large and impressive stone building, one of the most imposing in Greece, located just inside the old walled city, or kastro, to the rear of the former Jewish quarter. Built in the 1820s, it occupies the site of an older synagogue which probably dated back to the 17th century. (See more on the JHE pages for Greece.)
The JTA article notes that the New Media Lab at the Hellenic Studies Center at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University has “designed a website detailing Ioannina’s Jewish history, and a soon-to-be-launched app will let people explore Jewish sites in the town and listen to survivor testimonies.”
But it (oddly) does not mention the still-active small Romaniote synagogue in New York, Kehila Kadosha Janina, which also includes a small museum on Romaniote culture, history and traditions and programs various activities.
See photos of the Kal Kadsho Yashan synagogue