The Jewish Synagogue of Corfu

Also known as La Scuola Greca, this is the only surviving synagogue in Corfu town, which today has a Jewish population of between 50 to 100 people. In case you were in any doubt today about the meaning of the word genocide, the Jews of Corfu town only 100 years ago formed about 10% of the population and there were four other synagogues. An estimated 2000 people were rounded up by German soldiers and sent to Auschwitz and Birkenau. The distance from Berlin to Corfu is over 2000 Km., so that is a real dedication to genocide.

I visited in October 2025 and took these photos of the interior and I think it was the first time I had been in a synagogue.

There is a memorial to the families who were lost.

Built in the 17th century, the two-floor pale yellow building features Venetian-influenced architecture. It escaped total destruction during the 1943 bombings and the tragic deportation of Corfu's Jewish population in 1944. It features a light-blue and yellow colour scheme, a grand Holy Ark, traditional wooden benches, and commemorative markers honouring local victims of the Holocaust. AI Overview

Corfu itself went through a lot of upheaval over the centuries having a series of different influences or complete foreign control from Venetian to French to British and eventually to Greek. The plight of the island's Jews changed with each of these administrations and they fared better or worse depending on the politics of the time.

The earliest article I found in the newspaper archive is this from 1854. It is interesting that the term Israelites is used on a par with the name Jews. Nearly 200 years ago it was commonly understood without question that these were the displaced people of Israel.

Today, a false narrative has the Jews as colonisers of their ancestral homeland with Arab latecomers as the indigenous people of the land of Palestine. Palestine was in fact a Roman political creation and a name used in an effort 2000 years ago to disinherit the people of Israel. Part of that narrative used today describes Jews in the West Bank as settlers when in fact the actual name of The West Bank area is Judaea and Samaria, that is Judaea as in Jew.

Hebrew Observer - Friday, 10 November 1854

A GLANCE AT THE ISRAELITES IN CORFU.

(From L'Educatore Israelita.")

The greatest part of the Jews of Corfu are tailors, shopkeepers, hawkers, and porters. There are, however, also among them physicians, solicitors, merchants, and wine, oil, cotton, bill, and provision brokers. There are also tanners, cap-makers, and braziers. There are, however, many trades from which the jealousy of the Greeks excludes them, and it is for this reason that the whole community lives in misery, the numerous poor being a burden upon the few affluent. Most of the females of the humbler classes are washerwomen, others ply the needle, knit stockings, or are dress-makers, in which trades they display extraordinary skill. There are, also, some midwifes among them.

The Jews of Corfu are divided into two congregations. The one is called the Greek, and the other the Italian ; the latter is more numerous than the former. These two bodies have only in common the public school, and a few other charities, in every other respect they are quite independent of each other.

They, however, possess numerous benevolent establishments calculated to meet the various wants of Jewish poor; the places of worship, however, of which there are three large and two small ones, are not so well regulated. There has, however, lately been opened a new small synagogue, in which the abuses mostly complained of have been abolished, and which, probably, may exercise a beneficial influence upon the others. The prayer's are there said with great decorum, and the sale of the Mitzvohs discontinued, the expense of the establishment being borne by the members.

In 1891 there was a notorious series of riots in Corfu leading to a pogrom. This article describes the lead up to it.

St James's Gazette - Monday, 11 May 1891

ANTI-JEWISH FEELING. IN CORFU.

Reports received at Trieste from Corfu state that for the past three weeks the Jews there have been hardly able to leave their houses, and have been even obliged to keep their windows shut. In order to obtain provisions they have to go out early at dawn and to pay extortionate prices to unscrupulous shopkeepers. Great misery is said to prevail among them. Since the 23rd of last month all the synagogues have been closed. The burial of a Jew could take place only sixty hours after death under an escort of twenty soldiers. The whole trade of the town is paralyzed, and the population observes a hostile attitude towards the jews. An attempt to set fire to the ghetto was made the day before yesterday. The situation is said to be quite untenable, the more so as the native soldiers openly sympathize with the anti-Semite mob.

Bath Herald - Thursday, 14 May 1891

JEW-BAITING IN CORFU.

4,000 JEWS PRISONERS IN THEIR HOMES.

A paper in Trieste publishes private letters from merchants in Corfu, who describe the situation there as altogether desperate. Every one of the 4,000 Jews in the island is in constant danger of his life, and their only chance of safety is to lock themselves up in their houses, where, of course, they cannot earn their bread. Large stones are continually thrown against the shutters of the windows, and when the soldiers or the police try to interfere they are deprived of their weapons and these are used in the attempts to force open the Jews' doors. Hordes of excited men and women throng the streets, and it looks as if the people of Corfu intended to starve the unfortunate people out. In a community of 4,000 deprived of the necessaries of life there are of course cases of illness daily, yet it is impossible to fetch a doctor. The dead remain without burial for many days until the authorities can muster courage enough to protect the body and send a strong military force. At the close of a funeral last week the crowd demolished the Jewish cemetery, overthrowing the grave stones and setting fire to the chapel. On the Isle of Zante matters are if possible worse. Many shops were robbed and demolished, and a great number of Jews cruelly illtreated.

A line from the 1854 article above struck me "There are, however, many trades from which the jealousy of the Greeks excludes them". Remember, this was an observation written nearly 200 years ago.

The genius economist and cultural historian Thomas Sowell has much to say about what he has termed treatment of "middleman minorities" in history. There are other examples around the world but the Jews have consistently met with this reaction in many areas where they have settled, ironically because they have fled somewhere else.

Jewish people are historically targeted because of their disproportionate economic success and their historic role as a "middleman minority". When asked by a Jewish organization official what Jews could do to minimize the hostility they face, Sowell famously gave a one-word answer: "Fail." He added, "because as long as you succeed you're going to be hated."

Sowell argues that when a minority group arrives with very little and achieves immense upward mobility within a generation or two, it creates a psychological crisis for the surrounding majority. Observers of this success are faced with a choice: they must either blame themselves for their own stagnation, or they must hate the overperforming minority. Sowell notes that it is human nature to choose the latter, as hating the successful group protects the observer's ego. AI Overview

In one sense this is what has happened to Israel itself. Israel has been an unqualified success in what was a desert only eighty years ago. Once the Jews in Israel after 1947 had the agency to work and improve the country, they effectively showed up all of the other failed states around them. We are seeing what Sowell describes on an international scale. Tiny minority Israel outperforming all-comers on a world beating scale, is proof of what their neighbours were incapable of achieving. It is particularly aggravating to Socialists whose ideology consistently fails to produce success and happiness wherever it is trialled.

The prayer room is located on the second floor, with a section for women on the mezzanine. Made out of wood with a Corinthian colonnade, the tevah and aron kodesh face each other to the west and east.

Daily News (London) - Tuesday, 19 May 1891

Every Lloyd steamer brings fugitive Jewish families from Corfu to Trieste. They give painful details of the cruelties practised against their co-religionists at Corfu. The measures against the rioters were in every respect insufficient. At the outbreak of the disturbances the number of the military force at Corfu was 350, most of them natives of the island and inclined to make common cause with the mob. The Jewish population of Corfu and the other Ionian Islands hopes for successful help and support only from England, the other Powers being not energetic enough in their action towards Greece. More than 600 Jews have left the island during the last fifteen days, on board British, French, Italian, and Austrian steamers. The destitute among them have not been obliged to pay passage money.

Only three months later.

London Evening Standard - Tuesday, 18 August 1891

THE CORFU JEWS.

The Jews who last emigrated to Alexandria and to various places in Turkey have all returned to Corfu, where the popular feeling against them has disappeared, and the outrages which led to their flight appear to have been entirely forgotten. In the places to which the Corfu Jews migrated, they found neither employment nor succour of any kind. The olive harvest in Corfu is very prolific, and this cannot fail to be of great benefit to those who have returned.

---

53 years later.

Jewish Echo - Friday, 18 August 1944

JEWS OF GREECE

As to the total Jewish population in the entire of Greece, it probably does not exceed 30,000 persons. From a total of 100,000 Jews who lived in Greece at the beginning of the war, 65,000 or a little less have been deported to Poland, and the remaining 5000 have been arrested and sent to labour camps in the interior of Bulgaria.

Jewish Echo - Friday, 21 May 1948

JEWISH SURVIVORS ON GREEK ISLANDS

Athens .- Of the 1,900 Jews who lived in Corfu before the war, only 125 are now left, according to a recent survey made by the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece on behalf of the World Jewish Congress. Seven Jews are now living in Crete 343 were deported during the war and the vessel in which they were transhipped, was sunk at sea. Of the 1,900 Jews of the Dodecanese Islands, about 1,700 were deported to Poland. Only 60 Jews are left on Rhodes, one of the oldest Jewish communities in the Near East. The Jewish community of Zante was, for unknown reasons, the only one to escape Nazi attention. On the eve of the liberation it numbered 275 souls. Only 67 are now left, the rest having emigrated to Palestine.

(W.J.A:)

NEVER AGAIN

This statue was unveiled as recently as 2001 by the Municipality and the Jewish Community of Corfu. Shamefully, on my visit, there was prominent anti-Semitic graffiti around the town and multiple Palestinian flags. So the lies that lead to tragedy still continue.