The Minister of Education, Research and Religious Affairs, Konstantinos Gavroglu and the Secretary General for Religious Affairs, George Kalantzis, participated in the ceremony bestowing the title of “Righteous Among the Nations” on the family of Constantine Giannitsis who rescued the family of Asher Moissis during the Occupation in Greece. The event was organized by the students of the Athens College and took place at its premises.

The Minister of Education, Research and Religious Affairs highlighted the fact that the Ministry of Education in cooperation with the Embassy of Israel has changed the approach on such events by giving to secondary school students the responsibility to organize them. The Music School of Alimos organized such an event for the first time and then the 2^nd Middle School of Elefsina followed by the 1^st High School of Chania. In that way, events about true stories of special people who have risked their own lives and those of their families in order to rescue our fellow citizens of Jewish faith during the dark period of the Occupation have become part of the education process teaching sublime values of our civilization. As Minister Gavroglu pointed out, “there is a need to strengthen acts and ideas safeguarding democracy against the poison of fascism and of racism which have appeared again throughout Europe”.

 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.