Obj. ID: 52330
Jewish Architecture Holocaust Memorial Plaque in the Scuola Greca Synagogue in Corfu, Greece
To the main object: Scuola Greca in Corfu, Greece
Memorial Name
No official name
Who is Commemorated?
Jewish Holocaust Victims from Corfu
Description
This memorial plaque, located within the synagogue sanctuary, is a large marble slab shaped like a headstone. It bears inscriptions in Greek, English, and Hebrew and a list of families affected by the Holocaust.
At the apex of the plaques arch, above the inscriptions, there is an engraved Magen David, and beneath the inscriptions is an engraved Menorah.
Inscriptions
Greek
ΣΤΗ MNHMH TΩN 2000 EBPAIΩN THS KERKYPAE
ΠOY XAΘHKAN ΣΤΑ NAZIΣTIKA ΣTRATOΠΕΔΑ
ΣΥΓKENTPΩΣΗΣ TOY AOYΣBITΣ KAI MΠIPKENAOY
TON IOYNIO TOY 1944
Translation: In memory of 2000 Jews of Corfu who were lost in the nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau in June 1944
English
In memory of the 2000 Jews of Corfu
who perished in the nazi concetration [concentration] camps of Aushwitz [Auschwitz]
and Birkenau in June of 1944
Hebrew
לזכרם של יהודי קורפו די"ד
אשר הושמדו בתקופת דשואה ב-1944
Translation: In memory of the Jews of Corfu, may God [abbreviated here as "ד"] avenge their blood, who were destroyed during the Holocaust in 1944 [translator's note: inscription uses the Aramaic "דשואה" instead of the Hebrew "השואה" to refer to the Holocaust]
Greek
ONOMATA OIKOΓΕΝΕΙΩΝ
English
Family Names
[List of names in three columns]
Dedicated by the Jews of Corfu and their descendants
on June 10, 2002
Commissioned by
Jews from Corfu, and their descendants
7 image(s)
sub-set tree:
Width: 1.05 meters (approx.)
Shortly before World War II about 2,000 Jews were living on Corfu. During the Italian occupation (1941–43) there was little change in the status of the island’s Jews. This changed when the Germans occupied the island on September 27, 1943.
On June 9, 1944, all the Jewish families gathered on Army Square and then taken to the Old Fortress. They were forced to surrender all their valuables and keys to their houses, which were immediately plundered. Approximately 200 Jews, mostly women, managed to avoid the German roundup and escaped to villages in the island’s interior.
On 11 June, 300 Jewish women were transported on a towed barge to Igoumenitsa and then on trucks to Athens. On 14 June, all Jewish men, with the remaining women, were sent on barges to Patras, and then to Piraeus, and then to the Haidari concentration camp where after a few days they were crammed onto cattle cars, without water and little food. After a horrific 9-day journey, 1,800 members of the community reached the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Immediately 1,600 were sent to the gas chambers and the crematoria. Only 200 were selected for work, and very few of them survived until the end of the war.
A small community of survivors was reconstituted after the war, centered around the surviving but ruined 17th-century Scuola Greca synagogue. The synagogue has since been restored and this plaque was installed in 2002.
“War, German occupation and the Holocaust,” in digital exhibition At the Crossroads: The Jewish Community of Corfu. Jewish Museum of Greece, 2000., https://www.jewishmuseum.gr/en/historical-background-war-german-occupation-and-the-holocaust/ (accessed October 24, 2023)