=rhodos96
NOTES ON RHODOS, 1996

Jlem Post 14 May 96: (Tsur):

Yad v'Shem officials ...speaking following a ceremony honoring the
firt Turksih diplomat to have been recongizned by Yad v'Shem [as a
Righteous Gentile] Selahattin UlKumen, who was consul in Rhodes
[during WWII].
	One July 24, 1944, the day the Nazis gave orders to explel
the 1674 Jews in Rhodes and neighboring Kos, Ulkumen gathered the
seven Jews with jTurkish citizenship and told them they would be
sent back home safely.  He added another 43 realtives and friends
of the Turks.   When the Nazis called Ulkumen to inquire why they
had no apers, he t old them he was acing on orders from his
government to send them back even without documents.
	Ulkumen was recognized as a Rightous Gentile in 1989, one of
3 Moslems to receive the honor.

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Notes from an article by SueFishkoff, Jlem Post Magazine, 8 Nov 
96

City  founded 408 BCE.
Stadium (rebuilt  - Mecurouri? 3rd century BCE; Odium same?)
Walled  city  -- Knights of the Order of St. John,constructed 14th
& 15th  centuries.

"Jews were invited to Rhodes  by Suleiman the Magnificent, after
his 1522 conquest of the island.   The  community prospered under
Turkish occupation. In 1912,  when  the 30-year Italian 
occupation began, there were more than  4500 Jews on Rhodos, one-
third of the island's total population.   Thorugh the early years
of the 20th century, many young Jewish men left Rhodes to seek
their fortunes in the Beligan Congo, Rhodesia, and the mining
towns of the Transvaal. Their descedents now live in Belgium, the
US  and Israel... Racial laws imposed by Nazi order in 1938
stripped Italian citizenship from Jews who arrived on the island
after 1919,  forcing  half the community to emigrate."

"On July 24, 1944, afster six years of ever-harsher  persecutions,
the island's 1727 remaining Jews were ordered  to gather in a
central square in the Jewish quarter in the Old Town. A few dozen
young men escaped by boat during the night."   Notes 161
survivors.  Notes  7 Jewish families, "three of them from the
original community". [That would be the Sorianos, Mrs. Soulam, and 
I  guess Yakov's wife.

Notes that the Jewish cemetary was "forcibly removed from its
original location in 1937."

Speaks of "folk paintings  onthelight-blue walls.  "Maurice 
(Moises) Soriano heads the island's Jewish community today. Born
on Rhodes,he escaped by boat  to Turkey as young man just ahead of
the forced deportation  in 1944, and returned to Rhodes the 
following year.  He recalls the spring of 1949, when Israli
negotiators signed the Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement at
Rhodes.  For three months, the Israli and Arab delegations stayed
at the Baroque-style Hotel du Rose, now under renovation. Every
evening, after a hard day of neogiationg, Yitzhak Rabin, Yigael
Yadin, Moshe Dayan and the other Israeli delegates would stop by
the Soriano house for tea and whiskey."

[N.B.: Rabin?  He would have been quite  junior then.  ]

RECHECK POPULATION OF RHODOS 1912.  Fishkoff gives present 
population  as 80,000.   I had elsewhere heard, as memory serves,
that Jews contituted 1/10 of the island's population prior to
WWII.
                          
[See also letter-to-editor,  subsdquent week:  JP Mag 15 Nov 96,
Letter from Diana Schiowitz, Jlem:   "It is true that Jews were
invited to Rhodes  by Suleimein  the Magnificent, and were assured
by firman (edict) protective privileges not enjoyed previously by
any other minority.  But these Sephardi Jews wer joining an
already existing Jewish community described byf Benjamin ofTudela,
who visited Rhodesin1166,ascomprising5t00individ als.Tehfirst
concreteevidencethatJewsresidedin Rhodes before140BCE
isfoundinMacabees15:15024.AletterfromLucius,consulof theRomans,to
King Ptolemytells ofthe renewsal
oftheoriginaltreatybetweentehJewish peopleandRome,
andorderedthatnoharmbefalltheJewes in theterritory.;

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-
R. Moshe Levy (Malka Levy  -- daughter  -- writing a book on
Rhodos, hopes to complete it in 96)

50 Avenue Churchill
??  3a  15 ??
1180 Bruxelles

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