The Consulate General of Greece in Sydney is honouring the memory of Thessaloniki's Jewish population which were deported to Nazi death camps, with a talk tomorrow evening entitled “The Holocaust in Thessaloniki" by visiting historian Dr. Leon Saltiel, in association with the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies and hosted by the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens, University of Sydney, at its premises.
The event commemorates the 80th anniversary of the deportation of Thessaloniki Jews to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where almost 95 per cent of the Greek city’s thriving Jewish community perished. This was a landmark event with significant impact on the character and recent history not only of the city of Thessaloniki, but of Greece as well.
Upon invitation by the Consulate General, the visiting (17-22 April) renowned historian Dr. Leon Saltiel, having extensively written on the topic, will give two lectures in Sydney - unfolding the history of the Thessaloniki Jews through valuable testimonies of Holocaust victims, while elaborating on the aftermath of this calamity for the Greek Jewish community.
The presentation will narrate the long history until the last days of the once prominent Jewish community of Thessaloniki, the overwhelming majority of which was transported to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in 1943. Almost 95 per cent of the 50,000 Jews in Greece’s second largest city did not survive the war, most of them deported and exterminated in German-occupied Poland. The Jews constituted a large percentage of Thessaloniki’s population, with a long presence in the city, who contributed to the social, economic, political and cultural life, and their loss has marked the development of the city –and the whole country—to this day.
Entry: Free
Date: April 20, 7pm
Venue: The Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens, CCANESA Boardroom, Madsen Building , University of Sydney
About the presenter:
Leon Saltiel holds a Ph.D. in Contemporary Greek History from the University of Macedonia, in Thessaloniki, Greece, and has been a post-doctoral researcher at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. His publications include The Holocaust in Thessaloniki: Reactions to the Anti-Jewish Persecution, 1942–1943 (Routledge 2020), which won the 2021 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research, and ‘Do Not Forget Me’: Three Jewish Mothers Write to their Sons from the Thessaloniki Ghetto (Alexandria 2018) in Greek and (Berghahn 2021 in English). He is Director of Diplomacy, Representative at UN Geneva and UNESCO, and Coordinator on Countering Anti-Semitism for the World Jewish Congress.
