[MGSA-L] from Yitzchak Kerem ykerem@actcom.co.il

Mon Sep 6 17:32:30 PDT 2004

Please distribute my unpublished letter submitted to the editor of Haaretz in reaction to the Theodorakis interview. Haaretz did not publish any of the letters submitted regarding Theodorakis in a Greek context, which is unfortunate. The published letters either deemed him an anti-Semite or not in a general sense, and did not help further understand this phenomenon. Nor did they contribute to any future Jewish/Greek-Orthodox rapprochement by admitting that a hate and stigmatization problem exists and then talk about educational paths for dialogue and reconciliation.

Shalom, Yitzchak Kerem

Regarding ""The Jewish problem", Haaretz Magazine, August 27, 2004

    Regarding Israel's former friend, the Greek singer Mikis Theodorakis, I would like to comment that he is fueled by more than 2000 years of Greek hate toward Judaism and the Jews; beginning from pagan classical times and extending through the Greek-Orthodox Church under Byzantium and reaching the modern Greek State from 1821 until present. Instead of condemning Greek-Orthodox religious allegations and fanatic actions against the Jews in the form of blood libels, the burning of the effigy of Judas (accused of killing Christ) on Easter, and theories of the Jews controlling the global economy, he strengthens them. Similar to many in Greece and throughout the Greek-Orthodox diaspora, the Jew is the source of all evil and problems. Anti-Americanism is expressed through blaming the Jews and Israel. 

    In a confused Greece, neither East nor West, where Greek-Orthodox nationalist chauvinism prevails and xenophobia is a continuing phenomenon, there is very little tolerance for minorities; whether they be Muslims in Thrace, Macedonians in the Florina region, pacifist Jehovah Witnesses, gypsies (Roma) in the Marousi and Leosia suburbs cleansed for the Olympics, or Jews bearing the brunt of anti-Semitic Israel bashing and a resurgence of neo-Nazism since the late 1990s. The government prevents the building of a mosque in Athens despite its admitting thousands of foreign Muslim and African workers. Dozens of anti-Semitic events against synagogues, cemeteries, and Holocaust memorials throughout Greece, and even an attack on Salonikan rabbi Mordechai Frizis have usually gone by without comment of condemnation by both socialist and rightest governments. Similar to the Greek press and media, whether the neo-Nazi fringe or the mainstream, Theodorakis goes beyond acceptable criticism of the Sharon government and actions toward the Palestinians, and dresses it with classical anti-Semitic and Nazi labels. 

      M. T. displaces great ignorance of his own people's history. While he lauds the 1922-1923 population transfer between Greece and Turkey, 100,000 Asian Minor refugees in Thessaloniki (Salonika) became a majority of the city reducing the Jewish majority to a quarter of the city, instigated anti-Semitism in legislation (forbidding work on Sunday and causing the Jews to forfeit a day of work or desecrating the Sabbath), and rioted against the Jews of the city in 1931 and burned down the Jewish Campbell neighborhood. As a result of the riots which took place throughout half of the city, some 15,000-18,000

Salonikan Jews migrated to Eretz-Israel in the 1930s and some 15,000 migrated to France. This same Greek-Orthodox population brought a tradition of over fifty blood libels throughout Asia Minor against the Jews in the 19th century. There was little rescue in Salonika in the Holocaust since this large population despised the Jews. Hence, most of the 56,000 Jews of Salonika were not rescued and died in Auschwitz/Birkenau or other concentration camps. Only 2,000 returned to Greece. The Greek leftist resistance movement did not save tens of thousands of Jews in the Holocaust as Theodorakis spewed in his typical Communist rhetoric (he's still an active Communist despite the fall of Eastern European Communism 15 years ago). Some 800 Jews from Salonika joined the leftist Communist-run resistance movement, and a year after the deportation of Salonikan Jewry, some 10,000 Jews were rescued through separate concerted efforts by the leftist resistance movement, the Greek-Orthodox and Catholic Churches, and the Greek police in the Athens and Thessaly regions. Most of those outside of Salonika were also deported; and not saved by the Communist partisans as Theodorakis falsely ascertains. In Ioannina, where MT's grandmother feared the Jews for their "alleged killing of Christians" to use their blood (for baking Matzot on Passover), the Christians woke up in the middle of the night to jeer the native Greek-speaking Jews as they were arrested and deported en-route to Auschwitz on 24-25 March 1944.  

      In the spirit of Eastern-Orthodox solidarity with Serbia in the 1990s, M.T. sided with the Serbs, the oppressor, and condemned the U.S. for its attacks on Serbia. Like most of the people of Greece, he did not condemn Serbia for enacting genocide upon Muslims in Bosnia and Catholic Croatians; nor did he condemn Serbia for raping, butchering, and plundering the Muslims and Albanians in its "near-genocide" in Kossovo. Similarly, in the spirit of human rights, he supports Palestinian nationalism, but fails to condemn the anti-Jewish terror of the mainstream Palestinian Tanzim movement or the Muslim fundamentalist Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements.

     In a country like Greece where the protocols of the Elders of Zion continue to be distributed, Theodorakis continues false insinuations that the Jews control the world. In a parochial and isolated chauvinist and zealously nationalist Greece where you are not fully accepted unless you are Greek-Orthodox, MT is not only unaware of how the world functions, but is equally unaware that white Protestants in the USA and England control the world politically, own most of the major oil companies, and people like Bill Gates of Microsoft or Ted Turner who owned CNN have far more influence than any Jews. While he claims that the Jews and Israel have a great hand in the technological control of the world, it would be equally ludicrous to say that the former Greek ex-patriots who carry great weight and numbers on the faculty of MIT, and as grad students, control US and world technology and deduce thus that Greece and the Greek-diaspora control the world. In opposition to MT's comment that the Greek-Orthodox Church has no dogmas, MT views and judges the Jews according to deeply engrained medieval Eastern-Orthodox dogmas. As opposed to the Catholic Church, the Greek-Orthodox Church has yet to remove its anti-Semitic motifs from its liturgy. 

Yitzchak Kerem

Historian of Greek Jewry and Modern Greek History

Jerusalem

ykerem at actcom.co.il

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