The history of the Jews who lived in our city was the subject of the work that was carried out in the 2017-18 school year from Section B4 of the 6th General Lyceum of Heraklion within the framework of the "Project" course.

The work aimed at seeking the historical presence and course of the Jewish community in Heraklion until their complete extermination by the German Nazis in 1944.

The supervising professor, computer scientist with Msc in Theology, Mr. George Chatzizisis, told "PATRIS" that the children participated with particular interest in the search for information and enjoyed the role of the historical researcher.

He proposed to students to work for a population group that no longer exists in our city because of population or war exchanges such as Muslims and Catholics. The pupils even mourned when they learned.

 By Margarita Gokun Silver*, TABLET, January 10, 2019

‘We keep our memories alive,’ said the mayor of Trikala, where a new memorial was recently unveiled

On the morning of Nov. 11, 2018, a crowd of almost 200 people gathered in the center of Trikala, a Greek city located some 300 kilometers north of Athens. Conversing mainly in Greek, but also in Hebrew, English, Italian, and German, they were waiting at one of the main entrances to the old Jewish quarter to participate in the unveiling of Trikala’s Holocaust Memorial. Erected to commemorate the city’s 139 Jewish victims, the memorial is a joint initiative of the Trikala government and the city’s Jewish community.

“It was an obligation to our citizens, to the Jewish Community, to the memory,” Dimitris Papastergiou, the mayor of Trikala, told me via email. The idea first surfaced in his conversation with Victor Venouziou, a native of Larissa who was raised as part of Trikala’s Jewish community and survived the Holocaust because the villagers of Amarantos—50 kilometers away, it was called Mastroyianni in the 1940s—hid him and his family. Last year Venouziou financed a monument in Amarantos to thank them. “Within five minutes we agreed that the city and the Municipality of Trikala also had to erect their own monument,” Papastergiou said.

JTA, 7.1.2019: Athens, In a small, nondescript classroom in Greece’s capital city, 10 Jewish eighth-graders study a biblical text about Jacob and Esau under the guidance of Rivkah Carl, a Jewish teacher from Teaneck, New Jersey.

The students chatter loudly in Greek among themselves, though the language of instruction is English. In an adjacent classroom, nine kids — each wearing headphones and sitting in front of computer monitors — listen as their Israeli instructor teaches them Hebrew.

But this is no Jewish school. In Athens’ dwindling Jewish community, now at about 3,000 members, there simply aren’t enough children to support a Jewish middle or high school.

So community leaders came up with a unique solution: a special Jewish track at the prestigious American College of Greece, a private school founded by Christian missionaries in 1875 with a middle school and high school division called the Pierce School.