A major new digital resource for the history of Greek Jewry has now been made publicly accessible. Iōsēpos, created by the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki, brings together more than 212,000 unique items and over 2 million digital images relating to
the Jewish communities of Greece. According to the project’s organisers, it includes archival material, photographs, oral testimonies, sound recordings and other documentation intended to serve both the general public and the international research community.
The importance of the project lies not only in its scale but in the history behind the material. Much of the surviving archive of the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki relates to the period after the great fire of 1917, which destroyed earlier communal records.
During the German occupation the archives were seized, dispersed and, after the war, ended up in several locations, including Moscow, Offenbach, YIVO and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The new platform helps to reunite, in digital form, material
that had long been fragmented and difficult to access. כנראה זה אינו כולל את החומר מהארכיון לתולדות העם היהודי בארץ.
For readers interested in Sephardic genealogy, Iōsēpos may prove especially valuable. Thessaloniki was one of the principal centres of the Sephardic world from the arrival of Iberian exiles in 1492 until the destruction of the community in the Holocaust,
and the archive promises to illuminate both communal institutions and everyday life. Beyond the core repository, the wider project also includes oral history, music, biographical material and digital reconstructions of Jewish Thessaloniki, suggesting a resource
that will be useful not only for family historians but also for anyone studying the broader Sephardic past in Greece.