August 18: The Terrible Fire of Thessalonika

A massive fire destroyed a third of the Greek town of Thessaloniki (aka Salonika), a prime center of Sephardic Jewish life, on this date in 1917. The fire left 70,000 people homeless, including some 53,000 Jews. Over half of Thessaloniki’s population was Jewish, mostly Ladino-speaking, with more than fifty synagogues and numerous schools and other communal institutions. (The Jewish population included Karaites, a sect dating back to Baghdad in the 7th-9th centuries that rejected the authority of the Talmud, as well as remnants of the followers of Shabtai Zvi, the false messiah of the 17th century.) Much of the devastated Jewish community emigrated to Palestine or to France, an occupying power towards the end of World War I; those who remained and rebuilt were dispatched by the Nazis, mostly in Auschwitz.

“Out of the 46,091 Jews deported to the extermination camps, only 1,950 returned alive . . .”
—Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture