In the City of the Famed Greek Cheesemakers, a Resplendent

Yanina The Last ROMANIOTES ofYannina In the city of the famed Greek cheesemakers, a resplendent synagogue stands in sharp contrast to a neglected cemetery, testimony to the priorities of a small but unique community. The liturgy here preserved is the closest in existence to the ancient tradition of the Land of Israel | Tsur Ehrlich While other communities suffered repeated expulsions, the Jews of Yannina enjoyed years of stability, the reason perhaps for their typically Greek, laid-back character 10 December 2010 www.segulamag.com Yanina ROMANIOTES Yannina The Jewish Journey through History Tevet 5770 11 Yanina t was more like a forest than a cemetery," Rebecca Salem recalls. "The thicker trees Ihad been chopped down by the community before our visit, but the place was still badly overgrown. We had to remove creepers deli- cately so as not to damage the gravestones. The whole area was riddled with animal burrows, and full of tortoises. There were four of us, all students, three of us female, not exactly experi- enced woodchoppers or the rough-and-tumble physical type, but our eagerness to uncover the distant past of the singular Jewish community of Ioannina was an excellent substitute for missing muscles." "We discovered a wide variety of gravestones hidden in the thickets. Some were in Hebrew, occasionally even including poetic verses and rhymes, while others were written in Greek script. There were gravestones that were decades old; others dated back hundreds of years. No apparent logical order reigned in this mixture of new and old, Hebrew and Geek, recent graves from the last century alongside ancient ones. Towards the end of our week's work, by which time we had become more se- lective about what to dig up and were no longer attempting to uncover everything, we saw a headstone poking out at the edge of the cemetery and decided to take a look before deciding whether to proceed. Seeing large, coarsely chis- eled letters, we opted to dig. The letters were so faded that we had to blacken them with mud to read the inscription." Overwhelmed with how got word to the head of the community, who Above: The city's colorful excitement, the rushed over to see." facades Salem adds: "Over the next few days the Photograph by Demitris Kilimis community elders community elders arrived. It was crazy – they Facing page: The local gabbai, a holocaust survivor arrived hobbled over stumps and stumbled over chopped who lost his grandson in the branches to reach the site. Overwhelmed with Second Lebanon War, locks excitement, some even wept. When the cem- the synagogue's doors. etery was first built it was on the outskirts of An Artifact of their Own the town, but the city expanded and now it's "That's how we made our most thrilling right in the middle. The local council has had discovery: a gravestone from 1426, rare physi- its eye on the real estate value of the property cal evidence that the local Jewish Romaniote for years, trying to buy it from the community community predates the arrival of the Spanish for building projects, while the community, for exiles, just as its leaders claim. Wildly excited, its part, badgered the council for upkeep and we called over the rest of our group, and some- repairs. Now they are the proud possessors of an 12 December 2010 www.segulamag.com Yanina The Jewish Journey through History Tevet 5770 13 Yanina Changing approach. The artifact. I feel our stay has left the community corner of the synagogue with a true gift. And that's apart from all our romaniote, facing the old city was once the building's entrance documentation work, the map of the cemetery, Neither Sephardic (below). This entrance is no the synagogue and the pictures." longer in use. Today Salem is the Coordinator for Resource nor Ashkenazi Development (she is responsible for raising funds) for the project that sent the delegation in the first place – the "Journey into Jewish Heritage" Project of the Zalman Shazar Center, supported by the Avi Chai Foundation. Then studying Jewish and Com- parative Folklore at the Hebrew University, she set out for Greece in the summer of 2006 as part of a delegation of 26 students. They visited the cities of Thessaloniki, Ionnina (or Yannina), Veroia, Drama, and Kavala, before dividing into smaller groups, each of which focused on a different loca- tion. Salem's group went to Ionnina in northwest Greece, one of the only remaining Romaniote Jew- ish communities in the world. A Unique Liturgy The Romaniotes are thus known because they lived in the heart of the Eastern Roman or Byz- antine Empire, in places that nowadays form part of western Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, and Albania. Their siddur (prayer-book) is sometimes called the Roman liturgy - neither Sephardic nor Ashkenazi, it reflects the ancient liturgy of the Land of Israel. This tradition is highly pronounced in the community of Ioannina, who claim to have arrived there directly from Israel without stopping elsewhere in the Diaspora. Some say they came as early as the Second Temple period, while others date their arrival to the years immediately following the De- struction. Citizens of Rome, their secular culture was Hellenistic in the main. They spoke an ancient Greek dialect called Yevanic (Judeo-Greek), which was similar to the dialect spoken by Greek Chris- tians, but with Hebrew elements and written in a version of the Hebrew alphabet. "Only the Romaniote liturgy preserves a sub- stantial number of 7th and 8th century piyutim (liturgical poems) from the Land of Israel in the period following the Muslim conquest," explains Prof. Joseph Yahalom of the Hebrew University, who researches Medieval piyutim and poetry. Apart from the Cairo Geniza, the Romaniote liturgy is the only source we have for Hebrew liturgical poetry composed in the Holy Land in a period which is essentially a "black hole" as far as written texts are concerned. "The poetry of Yochanan Ha- 14 December 2010 www.segulamag.com Yanina The Jewish Journey through History Tevet 5770 15 Yanina places experiencing a large influx of Spanish exiles at this point in time. Sephardic Jewry, the product of a golden age of prosperity and culture only a few generations earlier, arrived well-equipped with a rich and established tradition. The customs of the Sephardic Jewish community, their halakhic prac- tices and siddur, including piyutim based on the compositions of the famed Spanish Jewish poets, displaced, if not wiped out, the local traditions. 'A harmonious merging of communities' might be a more positive way of describing the process of mutual assimilation through interethnic marriages which ensued. The unique Romaniote tradition was almost destroyed. Almost, but not entirely. Isolated communities, such as that on the island of Corfu and in the city of Thessaloniki, continued to observe Romaniote customs and to preserve their liturgy. Prominent amongst these communities, which were almost entirely destroyed in the Holocaust, was that of Ioannina. Well-established and self- confident, the community was perhaps sufficient- ly uncompromising to retain its traditions. In the first decades after the Expulsion the leaders of the community insisted on maintaining a single synagogue serving the recent arrivals as well as the original community, with services based on solely on the Romaniote liturgy. When the Sephardim were finally able to build their own synagogue, halfway through the 16th century, they took the Romaniote prayer book with them. The liturgy of Kohen ben Yehoshua features prominently in the Byzantium had triumphed. Romaniote siddur, alongside many others," adds The only synagogue in the modern State of Is- Yahalom. A member of the community rael to preserve certain Romaniote traditions was "While the Romaniote liturgy can be compared points out the names of her established by immigrants from Ionnina in the relatives on the community with the more widely familiar Italian prayer book, memorial wall. Nachlaot neighborhood of Jerusalem – further which also favours piyutim, it was completed Photograph by Dimitris Kilimis witness to the unique character of this com- earlier; the ancient southern Italian community is munity. Yet even here the Sephardic siddur has actually Romaniote in origin, as the south of Italy won a belated victory: the main prayer service is was Byzantine. The Italian siddur was consolidated the conducted according to Sephardic tradition, in Rome, in an effort to unite all Italian Jewry." with Romaniote overtones in the piyutim and melodies. In the entire world there are apparently All But Swept Away only three Romaniote synagogues: in Athens; in Some six centuries later, the Spanish Expul- Chinatown, New York; and the synagogue in Ion- sion of 1492 resulted in the arrival of countless nina visited by the delegation (see box). Sephardic Jews in the Balkans. In most communities, Sephardic Jewish culture became the domi- Five per cent survived Auschwitz nant one, as the old Romaniotes were gradually The official name of the city is Ioannina, which assimilated by the recent arrivals – a process paral- means "town of John" in Greek, after the Christian leled over the entire expanse of North Africa, in apostle John, which was a good reason for Jews Aleppo in Syria, and essentially in the majority of to prefer the slightly easier to pronounce form of 16 December 2010 www.segulamag.com Yanina Yanina. The earliest traditions date Jewish set- beauty of Yanina itself. The town lies on the banks tlement in the area to the days of Alexander the of Lake Pamvotis, looking out from the turrets of Great, but written testimonies to its existence – its churches and castles towards a delightful islet which now include the grave inscription discov- in the middle of the lake and on to distant, snow- ered by the delegation – date from the 14th century capped mountains beyond.

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