On Thursday, February 11 at 7 p.m., Dr. Sarah A. Stein, Professor of History, U.C.L.A and Dr. Joe Halio, physician and President of the Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture, will discuss “A Sephardic Journey: The Jews of Salonica from the Ottoman Empire to the Holocaust.” The Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies is sponsoring the event that will be delivered remotely via Zoom, and Gross Center Director Michael A. Riff, Ph. D.  will act as moderator for the event.  Registration to attend via Zoom is at: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-jews-of-salonica-from-the-ottoman-empire-to-the-holocaust-tickets-13608394975

For centuries, the Ottoman port of Salonica, or Thessaloniki, as city now part of Greece is known today, was home to a large, diverse and influential community of mostly Sephardic Jews, whose ancestors found refuge there following the Spanish Inquisition. Among them was the Levy family. It is their journey that prizewinning historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein explores in her highly acclaimed book, Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2019). As the title indicates, this chronicle traces their movement of the Levy clan through the transformations of the twentieth century that took them from what was an Ottoman-Turkish city that became part of Greece to not only Western Europe, Israel, Brazil, and India, but also the ramp at Auschwitz.