(Author: Isaac Habib, Vol. 69, No. 3, Chanukah 2014)
For the last few years, I have been visiting Rhodes, where both my parents came from. Today, it is part of Greece but it had changed hands for over two thousand years. Being a strategic island, it was invaded by the Romans, Venetians, Crusaders and Ottomans. Closer to our time, in 1912, this beautiful land became part of Italy after the Balkan War between the Turks and the Italians. Prior to that, it had belonged to the Ottoman Empire since 1522. Under the Ottomans, the Jews in Rhodes were able to practice Judaism, albeit having to pay a tax to the Turkish government for that right (as did Christians). Jews and Muslims lived within the medieval wall built by the Crusaders, while Christians lived outside the old city. Jews and Turks lived in perfect harmony, with mosques towards the upper part of the town and the Jewish Quarter and its six synagogues situated in the lower part of the inner old city, close to the port.
In 1789, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen was proclaimed in France, and on 27 September 1791, a decree emancipated forever the Jews of that country. On 17 May 1860, a group of Jewish French intellectuals founded the Alliance Israelite Universelle, with the aim of organising Judaism on a universal basis and with the moral duty of uplifting and educating their poor co-religionist around the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and the European territories of the Turkish Empire.1 Thus it came to be that one of these schools was to be found in the heart of the Jewish Quarter of Rhodes. Built in 1904 by the Baron and Baroness Edmond de Rothschild, the children in Alliance Israelite Universelle school had to learn French, but the community dictated a religious teaching and the upkeep of Jewish traditions.
In 1912, the Treaty of Lausanne gave Rhodes and all the other Dodecanese islands to the Italians. The latter proceeded to develop Rhodes, building a road network and, after 1922, massive buildings glorifying the power of Fascism under Mussolini. Italian culture was brought to the island; schools had to educate their pupils according to an Italian curriculum and the Alliance Israelite Universelle became the Italian Jewish School. Children were taught Italian and embraced the Italian culture. While their mother tongue was Djudeo-Spanish (Ladino), brought by their forefathers from Spain after the Edict of Expulsion of 1492, Jewish children were thus able to converse, read, and write both French and Italian.
The beginning of the 20th Century, as a result of economic difficulties, saw the commencement of emigration from Rhodes, to the USA, Argentina, Belgian Congo and Rhodesia. The Italian government, unable to expand their territories further, saw, through the Jewish community, a way to expand culturally. The Governor of the Island, Mario Lago, suggested to the central government in Italy the creation of a Rabbinical College. This was approved, and in 1928, the Collegio Rabbinico di Rodi opened its doors. Youngsters came there from various countries, graduating with a diploma signed by the Governor, the Beth Din, and the Director of the school, Ricardo Pacivici.
Life for the Jews of Rhodes seemed destined for a good future until, in 1938, Mussolini made an alliance with Hitler’s Germany and imposed Nazi-style racial laws against the Jews of Italy and its colonies. Jewish life in Rhodes took a turn for the worst. Children were expelled from non-Jewish schools, no Jews could be civil servants, kosher slaughter was prohibited, Jews had to work on Shabbat and the Rabbinical College was closed down. Unable to find work, more young Jews emigrated. But worse was to come when, that same year, the new Governor of the Island, Mario de Vecchi di Val Cismon, ordered the relocation of the Jewish cemetery to its present sites. The Rhodian Jews had the heavy task of exhuming the bodies of their loved ones and burying them for a second time.
Today, one can see the Rhodes British War Cemetery opposite the Jewish cemetery. After Italy broke its alliance with Germany in 1943, Germany invaded the island and, on 23 July 1944, the Jewish community of Rhodes was deported to Auschwitz, where most of them perished.
Rhodes was liberated by the British army. During one of my many trips to the island, I decided to go and explore the British War Cemetery, where Christians, Moslems, Hindus, and Jews served with or alongside the Royal Air Force. As I entered, two tomb stones attracted my attention. Both had a Magen David on them. Coming closer, I saw engraved on one of them a Springbok with the slogan, in English and 33 Afrikaans, “Union is strength/Eendrag maak maag”. I stood in front of this stone, speechless. How could it be? In Rhodes, so far from home and on this island so dear to me, a young South African Jew had found his final resting place!
The name on the tombstone read, “Lieutenant I M Seel, S.A.A.F. 19th September 1943, age 24”. Below the Magen David was the legend, “Gone to rest through the pathway of duty, venturing his life that others may live”. September 1943 – those very same months when Germany occupied Rhodes. The inscription on the other stone read, “Pal/8363, Gunner H. Federmann, Royal Artillery, Long Range Desert Group, 24th October 1943, Age 22”. As we Jews do, I placed a stone on each of the graves.
Two years later, I went back to Rhodes with two cousins from Johannesburg. We visited the old, no longer Jewish, Quarter, and the Shalom Synagogue, built in 1577 by Sephardic Jews who had fled Spain and who began arriving in Rhodes after 1522, the year it fell into Ottoman hands.
We had a wonderful time together, moments of joy, times of melancholy. We could not but think of our parents, all from Rhodes, relating the stories they used to tell us, almost comparing notes. Our mothers were sisters. Miriam’s mother, my aunt, left Rhodes before the war, to get married in Salisbury, and my mother, with two sisters and our grand-mother, were sent to Auschwitz. My mother survived the various camps and after the war decided to join her two sisters in Rhodesia. On the way there, she met my father in the Belgian Congo. He had been born in Turkey but had little recollection of it as he came to Rhodes as a child.
Our grand-father, Nissim Capelluto, was among those exhumed from the old cemetery and reburied in 1938. The three of us went to meditate at his grave, washing the tombstone, scrubbing it and restoring its white marble colour. As we left the cemetery, I wanted to show my cousins the tombstones of those young Jews who had fought to free Rhodes. When we entered the British War Cemetery, however, I was stunned. Two empty spaces now stood among all the graves. No Stars of David. Gone! How could this be?
Back in Cape Town, in one of our second generation survivors meeting at the Cape Town Holocaust Centre (where I do voluntary work as an educator), we were asked if we had anything to share. Sitting next to me was Gwynne Robins from the Jewish Board of Deputies. I related what had happened in the British War Cemetery. Gwynne asked if I had any pictures of the missing stones. Luckily, I had kept every picture. As soon as she received the pictures, she set the ball rolling, going through all the various channels to get an answer. And the answer came back: It was an act of antisemitism. Not even those responsible for British military cemeteries had been aware that this evil act had taken place on Rhodes.
Two new stones, identical to the ones removed, were ordered from France. It took two years, but eventually they were erected over the graves.
On 23 July 2013, after the Haskarah ceremony for the Jews of Rhodes who perished during the Shoah, we went to the British War Ceremony and said Haskarah and Kaddish in memory of I M Seel and H Federmann. As we did not know their full names, the rabbi found a way to say the Haskarah for them. Thus were these two young men remembered, seventy years after their passing.
Isaac Habib is a Cape Town-based poet and heritage tour guide. He works for three months each year as a tour guide on Rhodes Island, and has published a book of Ladino/English/Italian poems dealing with the Holocaust on Rhodes.
NOTES
- See Wynchank, Anny, ‘In the beginning was a school:The Alliance Israélite Universelle and its Legacy’, Jewish Affairs, Chanukah 2013.
