3rd GEL KAVALAS: LEARNING THE HISTORY AND THE TRAGIC FATE OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF KAVALAS - Central Jewish Council of Greece, coordinating body of the Jewish Communities of Greece

The school community of the 3rd GEL Kavala in a statement expresses its warm thanks to Aaron Tsiminos, son of the late Sabetai Tsiminos, as on Tuesday January 24, 2023, he opened his welcoming home and received in the most cordial way a delegation of his students and teachers school as part of a research paper on the Jewish Community of Kavala and its annihilation in the Treblinka extermination camp during World War II.

Mr. Tsimino gave an extremely interesting interview to the school's research team, which consisted of the students Mandrani Maria, Moysiadou Eugenia, Konstantinos-Christopher Nolan-Hioni & the teachers Dimitriadou Maria & Adamos Evangelos.

He referred to the long history of his family, the persecution suffered by the Jewish community of Kavala, the inhumane nature of fascism with most of the suffering it has caused to humanity as well as the great and complex legacy that his father left not only in his own homeland , Kavala, but also to historians, researchers and future generations. The tireless research of the late Sabbetai Cimino gave the children the opportunity and enabled them to illuminate, supplement and expand their study & knowledge of the Holocaust on the scale of the local.

In the announcement it is emphasized that "with the valuable material he collected through years of tireless research, we have the possibility today to know the fate of the Cavalier Jews who were forcibly rounded up by the Bulgarians, allies of Nazi Germany and led methodically and organized to their death, in the context of of the inhuman operation Final Solution, which aimed at the annihilation of the Jewish communities of the whole of Europe.

Early in the morning of March 4, 1943, Bulgarian soldiers blocked the entrances of Kavala and occupied main roads and junction points, while fifty teams entered the houses and arrested 1.484 people, members of 363 families. After being confined for days in the large tobacco warehouse of the Commercial Company of Salonica, they were trucked to Drama to be forwarded by rail north to the port of Lom on the Danube, with the final destination being the Treblinka crematorium, where two hours were enough for the unfortunate victims to be led to death in the gas chambers. Thus, tragically, the entire Jewish community of Kavala was wiped off the map and annihilated by the Nazis.

The meeting of Mr. Aaron Tsiminos with the students of our school was the best proof that the new generation must get to know the past well, in order to be able to build the future on solid foundations. It was not a simple recording and narration of historical data, disconnected from the reality we experience today. It was the children's contact with a piece of living history and an encounter with an authentic testimony of tragic events of prejudice, persecution and horse death.

Author Vladimir Nabocov wrote, "Nothing brings the past to life more effectively than a smell that has been associated with it." Unfortunately, human societies have not closed their accounts with the capital of fascism as, even today, the rise of neo-Nazi parties in many countries, the attempt to ideologically and politically revive fascism, the acts of violence by its ideological descendants at the expense of social of groups with racist segregation criteria, is a grim reality in front of which none of us can close our eyes and conveniently ignore.

As Mr. Cimino characteristically told us, school and education can lay the foundations for civil societies that will be deeply conscious of the most basic human duty: respect for the life of fellow human beings regardless of skin color, race, origin, religion, beliefs. Only in this way will we be able to build human societies with justice, tolerance and equal rights for all. And only a deep humanitarian education can achieve this. Our unshakable belief is that the school can and must fight for this".

SOURCE: kavalapost.gr, 9.2.2023

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