An Irishman's Diary

‘HELLO!” BOOMS the voice. It is more like a roar, or a command, as I step in from the searing Corfiot midday sun to stand in the compact hallway of the synagogue.

“Where are you from?” the boom demands to know.

Ireland, I say.

“Ah, Ireland!” There’s a pause for a moment as the information sinks in. And then comes the command: “Upstairs!” Eh, can I look in there? I ask, indicating the room from whence the voice cometh.

“Okay!” she says, in a sort-of “oh well, please yourself” tone.

Inside the room, the walls are lined with photos. One wall is devoted to Albert Cohen, born here in Corfu in 1895 but remembered more as the French-Swiss novelist he became (Le livre de ma mére, and Belle du Seigneur).

Two other walls show shots of Corfu town streets and buildings, before and after the Allied bombing of June 1944, an act designed to divert German attention from the Normandy landings.

Ruth – she of the booming voice – is a large lady of a certain age wearing over-sized Sophia Loren-style sunglasses and chain-smoking Pall Mall cigarettes. She sits by a small, cheap table pushed up against the third wall on which are contemporary children’s drawings. Two other women are with her and they chat amiably, interrupted regularly by booms of “Hello! Where are you from?” as the next tourist is ambushed verbally while ambling into the synagogue before being directed “Upstairs!”

Upstairs is the synagogue proper, a 19th-century temple on a site of worship for the Jews of Corfu for some 400 years. The room is rectangular and perhaps 100ft long by 25ft wide. The ceiling is high. Windows, some with stained glass, run down either side of the length of the room.

At one end stands the bimah, or rabbi’s platform, which is approached by a matching pair of gracefully twisting stairs. From this elevated position, the reader of ancient texts has a commanding view of the whole temple. A gallery was reserved for women during the years when the orthodox community dominated the synagogue. Standing on his bimah, the rabbi looking down the length of the temple would see the men, filling the double-sided, heavy mahogany pews, seated back to back, facing the side walls and not him.

The architectural and decorative style of the temple is simple and restrained. The exterior is likewise undemonstrative. Number 4 Velissarianou Street may be home to the Scuola Greca synagogue and even though today, the area remains known as Evraiki, meaning Jewish suburb, there is, in reality, precious little evidence of the Jewish community that lived in Corfu from around the mid-12th century.

The first Jews came from Thebes. In 1147, Benjamin of Tudela, found only one other Jew, a man known as Joseph the dyer, when he visited the island. In the 15th and 17th centuries, there was an influx of Jews from Spain, escaping persecution there, as with almost every migration of Jews across two millennia.

Between the 14th and 18th centuries, during which Venice was the dominant and controlling power on the island, the Jews experienced the familiar pattern of prosperity (within the confines of the enterprises in which they were permitted to engage) and accumulated wealth, followed by resentment and persecution. Corfiot Christians regularly petitioned the Senate in Venice to pass laws humiliating the Jews and curtailing their activities. To the Senate’s credit, they often acceded to counter-petitions from the Jews, and in 1408 and 1423, special laws were passed protecting the community.

They prospered and, like Jews everywhere, made contributions in commerce, manufacturing, medicine and the arts far beyond their numbers. Nonetheless, by 1901 and out of a total Corfu population of some 25,000, the Jews numbered 5,000.

In the early 20th century, there was some decline in numbers as the Zionist movement highlighted the attraction of migrating to Palestine, helped by the repeated pogroms in eastern Europe and Russia.

Just over 2,000 Jews remained in Corfu at the outbreak of the second World War, most of them living in Evraiki. When the Gestapo came for them in June 1944, they were rounded up and held initially in the Palaio Frourio, the fortress built, ironically, by their old protectors, the Venetians.

What became of them within weeks later in Auschwitz and Birkenau is remembered by a tablet mounted on a wall in the temple.

A total of 74 family names are there. Some are Greek in appearance, names like Barkolas, Konstantini, Moustaki and Semos. But others, such as Coen, Elia, Israel and Perez, are unmistakably Jewish.

“One hundred and fifty survived,” Ruth tells me. “Ten families were hidden by Greeks in the village of Viros. Now we are only 60 people here.”

There’s another cheery “Hello! Where are you from?” followed by “Upstairs!” as a pair of American tourists enter, before Ruth carries on telling me the history of the building and her caretaker role there.

She doesn’t tell me what happened in April last year when anti-Semites broke into the synagogue under cover of darkness at the start of Passover. The hooligans took books – sacred texts, torahs and judaica – and set fire to them on the temple floor.

Thankfully, the blaze was spotted early and extinguished, and the attack was condemned widely by political and religious leaders. Even today, it seems, a mere 60 Jews are too many for some people.