Research Project

"The Worst Times Are Not Yet Over: Jewish Life in Post-War Greece, 1944-1949"

The project seeks to offer a comprehensive examination of Greek-Jewish life after the end of the Second World War in 1945 and throughout the first phase of the post-Holocaust rehabilitation and reconstruction of Greek Jewry. By making incisive use of a wide array of archival sources held in Germany, Greece, Israel, Switzerland and the USΑ, of the manifold survivors’ audio visual and in-print testimonies, and the burgeoning scholarly literature on post-war Jewish rehabilitation, the project aims to follow the traces of Greek-Jewish survivors, from the liberation of Greece (October 1944) to the liberation of the camps and the first period of community reconstruction in 1945-1949. By collecting and processing all existing quantitative data, the project will discuss the diversity of wartime experiences – in the death camps, in hiding and the Resistance in Greece, as refugees in the Middle East –, as well as demographics, social and economic status, gender and age distribution, and political tendencies (e.g. Zionists, Leftists) and will also describe in detail the activities of international organizations and domestic Greek-Jewish institutions, such as the Central Board of Jewish Communities of Greece (KIS) and the Organisation for the Relief and Rehabilitation of the Jews of Greece (OPAIE), vis-à-vis reconstruction, rehabilitation, emigration and reparations throughout the 1940s, in order to carefully identify and analyse the circumstances that conditioned the post-war Jewish life in Greece.