Kal Gadol (Great Synagogue), Serres

La comunità ebraica

A Greek-speaking Romaniot community existed in Serres in Byzantine times and was noted by Benjamin of Tudela in the twelfth century. After 1453 many Jews were forcibly transferred to Constantinople, but Sephardi refugees arriving from Spain and Portugal in the early sixteenth century rebuilt the community and absorbed the older population. Serres became known for its rabbis, among them Joseph Taitazak and Solomon ha-Serroni, and for its Kabbalistic circles. Jews traded in tobacco, cotton, grain and manufactured goods. The community numbered about 1,500 in the 1870s and about 1,300 in 1905. It declined after the railway bypassed the town and was devastated by the Balkan Wars, but it doubled in the 1920s with tobacco workers, reaching about 725 people in 1931.

Architettura e design

Little is known of the building's construction, and no architect is recorded. According to the community historian Mercado Covo, as summarised by Moisis Konstantinis, the synagogue rebuilt around 1800 was very large and imposing and held about 2,000 people. A circular teva, several metres high and reached by a stair of fifteen steps, stood in the centre of the hall. The lower walls carried painted landscapes with the names of donors, and the upper part was ringed with glazed windows that flooded the interior with light. Its 26 windows were said to stand for the numerical value of the four letters of the divine name. The central part of the building rose higher than the nearby church of Agia Foteini. Attached spaces included a women's gallery, a yeshiva, a rabbinic library, a study hall, a hostel for poor travellers and a ground-floor room once used as a meldar school.

La vita nella sinagoga

The Kal Gadol was the religious and social heart of the community. On the eve of Yom Kippur, during the Kol Nidre memorial prayers, the cantor read out the names of every rabbi who had served Serres since the sixteenth century, a custom kept until the synagogue burned. Serres was famous for its cantors and poets; worshippers long remembered the voices of Joseph, Moshe and Aaron Amarillo, Abraham Matalon and the elderly Hakham Abraham Bueno. The last chief rabbi, Samuel Raphael ben Habib, was celebrated for his singing, and on Yom Kippur and Simchat Torah Muslim and Greek Orthodox families came to hear him lead the service. In the nineteenth century a breakaway prayer house in the Arabatzi quarter led to violent quarrels, and a worshipper, Joseph Salmona, was killed during a raid on the synagogue's Torah scrolls.

Distruzione

In the First Balkan War Bulgarian forces occupied Serres in 1912. In the Second Balkan War of 1913, as Greek divisions approached, the retreating Bulgarian army set fire to the city on 28–29 June 1913, after bombarding it. Covo described Bulgarian horsemen scattering incendiary powder through the streets so that houses, churches and synagogues caught fire within minutes. About 4,050 of 6,000 houses and 1,000 shops burned. The Kal Gadol, its yeshiva with the rabbinic library, and the new Alliance school were destroyed, along with most Jewish homes in the burnt zone; the community archive was also lost. Some Jewish sources date the burning of the synagogue to 1912. Under Greek reconstruction laws of 1914 and 1920 the burnt zone was replanned by lottery and the synagogue plot was not restored to its old use.

Il destino della comunità

After the fire many Jews left for Drama, Kavala, Thessaloniki and Bulgaria, and the rest crowded into the Arabatzi mahala. Bulgarian forces occupied Serres again in 1916–18 and forced ninety Jewish families to move to Bulgaria. In the 1920s the community recovered, with a new school in 1929 and a new synagogue beside it in 1933. In April 1941 Bulgaria occupied eastern Macedonia as an ally of Nazi Germany. On the night of 3–4 March 1943 Bulgarian police and soldiers arrested the Jews of Serres, about 471 people, and held them in a tobacco warehouse. They were taken through Bulgarian transit camps to Lom, shipped up the Danube and sent by rail to Treblinka, where they were murdered on arrival. A memorial lists 476 victims. Only three Jews lived in Serres after the war, and the community was never revived.

Il luogo oggi

Nothing remains of the Kal Gadol. Its exact site in the old lower Jewish quarter, between the churches of Agia Foteini and Agios Antonios, is no longer marked, because the burnt zone was rebuilt on a new street plan after 1920. The 1933 synagogue in the Arabatzi quarter has also disappeared. The former Jewish community school on Athanasiou Argyrou Street survives and is used as a primary school, and fragments of the Jewish cemetery lie on Mousala hill. A marble memorial to the 476 Jews of Serres was unveiled in 2000.

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