Historical Perspectives of Jewish Presence: Education and the Holocaust in Thessaloniki

This session from the conference Historical Perspectives of Jewish Presence presents three papers examining education, school archives, and the survival of Jewish students in Thessaloniki before and during the Second World War.

The first paper, given by the head teacher of the 67th Primary School of Thessaloniki, traces the history of the working-class districts of Rezi Vardar and Xirokrini, where homeless Jewish families settled after the fires of 1890 and 1917 alongside Greek refugees from Asia Minor and Thrace. Drawing on pre-war records discovered in the school in 2012, the archive of the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki, and the Historical Archive of Macedonia, he reconstructs the history of the 13th Primary School, the 7th Jewish School under head teacher Abraham Atas, and the private school of Gabriel Amar, before describing an educational project in which current pupils researched the neighbourhood's pre-war children.

In the second paper, Angeliki Gavriiloglou, Christos Panourgias, and Christos Chatziioannidis of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki present an ongoing project to catalogue and map the city's Jewish pupils during the 1942 to 1943 school year. Combining school registers with community archives, they cross-reference 453 students across public, private, and communal schools to identify Holocaust victims and survivors, and demonstrate a prototype QGIS web map plotting the students' addresses and biographies. A discussion follows with questions from the chair, Professor Apostolidis, Yitzhak Kerem, and Dr Ververidis.

In the third paper, Giorgos Antoniou examines how inter-ethnic social networks affected the chances of survival among Thessaloniki's Jews. Using records of 700 students at the State Conservatory of Music and 100 at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, he argues that while overall survival in the city was around four percent, those who studied alongside Christian peers at the conservatory had a survival rate of roughly forty percent, aided both by social ties in the city and by musical skills in the camps, as in the cases of Jacques Stroumsa and Michalis Assael. A second discussion with Apostolidis and Kerem debates demographic estimates of the 1943 deportations and the role of social capital.