Simon Marks Museum Of The History Of Thessalonikean Jewry

The museum is founded by the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki and is located in the city’s center at the Modiano Market place, which was the centre of the Jewish community from the time when the first Spanish Jews settled in the city until the Second World War.

The museum opened its doors in March 1997 having as its main purpose to keep the memory of Thessaloniki’s Jewish community alive.

The permanent exhibition displays copies of exhibits from the Beth Lohamei Agetaoth Kibbutz opened in Israel since 1933 and is titled:
“Thessaloniki” The Metropolis of Sephardic Jewry. Details of the history and the activity of the Jews of Thessaloniki and their contribution to the city’s economic development, their public welfare institutions, their publishing activity and the development of the Zionist movement are presented. The exhibits are from the period when the city was founded in 315 BC and especially from the year 1492 when 15–20,000 Spanish Sephardi Jews settled in Thessaloniki until the Holocaust of the city’s Jews during the German Occupation in WWII.

There are exhibitions of photographs relating to the Holocaust, replicate of the exhibition in the Auschwitz Institute in Brussels, texts and photographs reproducing the rise to power from the Nazis’, the German policy of racism, the life in the concentration camps, the annihilation of the Jews in the gas chambers and crematoria, the resistance’s hits and the liberation of the remaining prisoners by the Allied Forces in 1945.

There are shocking documentation brought back by the few Thessalonikean Jews who returned from the concentration camps and these are items as the two pieces of soap, one green and one white which were made from the body fat of slain Jews, a rusty metal identity plate bearing the number 118968, a bent spoon which Heinz Kounio brought back with him, and a camp prisoner’s uniform.

(Closest station Port of Thessaloniki in 350 meters distance)