More from the International Trip: Thessaloniki

This begins on our first morning in Thessaloniki, the night before I had pretty much fallen into bed, so I didn't really know much about the city. I did know that we weren't staying smack in the metropolitan center, sort of on the outskirts of downtown.
Day 6: This was Friday morning (to put things into perspective). Prior to coming to Greece we had learned a lot about the Thessaloniki Jews during the holocaust (Somewhere around 90% of them perished in the concentration camps) so the Jewish community there was a pretty big focus. A little bit more background: Thessaloniki was once called the Jerusalem of the Balkans, and Thessaloniki had the largest number and ratio of Jews in the community as compared with anywhere else. It used to be that when you were walking down the street every other person was Jewish. Now there are less than 3000 Jews remaining.
On Friday morning we walked to the synagogue in the center of town and met the Rabbi. The congregation there was Sephardic and on the walls of the synagogue there were plaques commemorating all of the prior Jewish communities that has existed in Thessaloniki (there were more than thirty no longer existing synagogues). We also toured a second synagogue that is used solely on High Holy Days. There we, as a group, were taught a Ladino (Hebraic Spanish) song by the Rabbi that would become almost the theme song of our trip and group (We actually sang it last night on Shabbat 11/27).

The Rabbi of the Thessaloniki Community

After the synagogue we visited the Jewish museum of Thessaloniki which was pretty interesting (it had a large focus on the effects of the holocaust) and then we were free to find our own lunch. I ended up at a seafood restaurant, and had shellfish! Which I hadn't had since leaving the United States due to the Kashrut of this program. Later that evening we headed back to the synagogue for Shabbat services and then had dinner at the community center there (the food was quite terrible).
Day 7: Shabbat morning. We walked back to shul for morning services. Some of the male members of our group were reading Torah. (This synagogue was an Orthodox Sephardic community with a mechitza). Following services we had lunch at the community center, then had time to do as wished, followed by Havdalah back at the hotel, then dinner back at the community center, then the night was ours to spend as we wished. Honestly one of the things I'm going to remember about Thessaloniki was the number of times we walked back and forth between the hotel and the synagogue.

Day 8: We woke up, packed up our bags and prepared to leave Thessaloniki. On our way out we stopped at a Byzantium architecture museum an a Greek archeological museum. The Greek archeological museum was much more interesting than the former, it had all of this ancient gold jewelry that was incredible to look at. From there we went to the Old City of Thessaloniki and looked over the city and the ocean from an overlook.

Views From the Old City

From there we visited the Holocaust memorial in the main square of downtown. The sad thing about the memorial was that it was next to a parking lot. There was much attention given to it by anyone in the city, and most people don't even know it exists. It was truly a beautiful memorial, it was this metal twisted sculpture with human forms and flames, and it was sculpted as a hannukiah.

Holocaust Memorial

From there we had free time for lunch, and then we made our way to the train station to board the six hour train to Sofia Bulgaria.