A freely accessible online database called “Iossipos” featuring more than 212,000 unique records and two million digital images from the pre-war Jewish communities of Thessaloniki, Athens, Rhodes, Larissa and Volos was unveiled this week. The vast digital repository was presented during an event organized by the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki at the Athens Concert Hall Tuesday.
The Iossipos project, named after the 1st-century AD Jewish historian Josephus, was implemented by the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki, with co-financing by the European Union and the national “Digital Transformation” 2021–2027 program, overseen by the ministry of digital governance. It was carried out by the Hellenic Telecommunications Organization (OTE) with Enneas IKE serving as subcontractor. Budgeted at roughly €4 million it was completed in a little more than three years with the participation of 30 professionals.
In one telling instance as shown on the digital archive: three addresses in Athens seem unrelated: Merlin 6, the intersection of Eduardou Lo and Stadiou streets, and Alikarnassou 26. Yet the interactive map displayed on a computer screen points to a thread of the same story — one that began in September 1943 at the Gestapo headquarters on Merlin Street in central Athens.
As history recounts, SS captain Dieter Wisliceny had summoned the Chief Rabbi of Athens, Eliaou Barzilai, and demanded that by the next day he hand over a list of all the Jews living in the occupied city. Asser Moissis (who would later serve as the first consul of Israel in Greece), who had recently moved with his family from Thessaloniki to the Athens district of Psychiko, waited for the rabbi at the intersection of Stadiou and Eduardou Lo to learn what the Gestapo had demanded.
Hours later when the rabbi returned to his home on Alikarnassou Street he was “abducted”. What happened is that he was first taken to a basement to have his beard shaved off and the next day, disguised, he was smuggled out to the western Greece town of Agrinio and from there to the mountains and partisans. Once safe, Barzilai asked the resistance to deliver a letter of thanks to Moissis for saving him.
A precursor to the museum
“This is a collection of documents, objects, photographs, and testimonies that allows visitors to gain a comprehensive understanding of the history of Jews in Greece. It will serve as a precursor to the Holocaust Museum currently under construction in Thessaloniki,” according to the Iossipos project’s technical manager, Giorgos Patseas.
A user only needs a family surname to search for birth and death certificates, family trees, photographs, and religious objects, among other digitized materials. While this material is invaluable for families — especially Jews of the diaspora — as well as researchers, Iossipos also covers many different aspects of Jewish culture through seven additional applications.
Heritage Section
The heritage section presents portraits of important figures of Greek Jewry, such as Albertos Nar, one of the most important narrators and recorders of Holocaust memory in Thessaloniki; Mordechai Frizis, the first Greek officer to die in the field of battle on the Albanian front in the 1940 war; and Julio Kaimi, a major scholar of the Karagiozis shadow theatre and a prominent artist of his time.
Unique recordings of songs, as well as narrations of significant folkloric value from the Molho family archive, are included in the music section. Meanwhile, stories like the one mentioned at the beginning of the text can be discovered by visitors through the interactive map of Jewish landmarks of memory and culture.