The Long Way from Rhodes

Walking along the streets of Cape Town you can see a beige building with shops on the street level. Only a star at the gate will indicate what can be found inside those walls. We are being greeted by a woman, perhaps in her fifties. Her hair had traces of a life lived. But what she was going to tell us, I couldn’t have even imagined. The synagogue belongs to the Sephardi Hebrew congregation. Many of the congregation members are the descendants of the Jews who lived on Rhodes. I felt compelled to tell these people’s story, because I haven’t heard about it before, and I can imagine that many people haven’t either. We have the obligation to keep the memories of victims of genocide alive. The story of the people who travelled the longest to their death.

Photo: Kim Groop

This is a story about the Jews from Rhodes. Rhodes is an island in the Mediterranean Sea outside Turkey. The island of Rhodes was under the Italian government during World War II until 1943 when the Nazis came to the island. It would take til 1944 until the deportation of the Jews from the island. When the Nazis came, they didn’t realize that Jews were living on the island. One of the things we found out was that the Rhodes Jews didn’t look like other Jews and that is the reason it would take years for the Nazis to destroy the Jewish community on Rhodes. The Jews didn’t speak the same language as many other Jews, they spoke their own language, Ladino.

On 18 July 1944, around 2000 Jews were loaded onto cattle trains and boats bound for Auschwitz. The group consisted of 1973 Jews from Rhodes and 100 Jews from the island of Cos. Some Jews were saved by the Turkish Consul because they had (or had previously had) Turkish citizenship. The youngest survivor Stella Surmani, and her mother Mathilda Hassan, who had an American passport, were not sent to Auschwitz.

When they arrived at Auschwitz, only approximately 500 people from the island of Rhodes survived the first selection. Only the ones that could be in use. At the end of the war, only 105 Jews from the island of Rhodes survived. Some of the survivors had been terrorized by the doctor of death and had to live their lives with the constant reminder of their time in Auschwitz with different scars. One of the survivors, Violette Fintz said that she had defeated Hitler because “I survived, I had children, my children had children…”.

Violette Fintz and other survivors. Photo: Sofi Laakso

The survivors spread across the world after the Second World War, for example, to Kenya and Zimbabwe and from there, to South Africa. Some of the survivors would settle down in Cape Town in South Africa and found a Sephardi Hebrew congregation.

The first Jews had come to South Africa in the 1820s and in the 1880s the development of Jewish life in South Africa began. After World War II, the infrastructure on Rhodes was down and therefore prospects were few. Some people saw the opportunities in Africa and some of the Jews of Rhodes moved to South Africa. To make a living, they worked as traders, e.g. they traded in District 6 in Cape Town. 

The Sephardi Hebrew congregation was founded in 1960 and is named in memory of the Congregation of Rhodes, which has the same name. The synagogue that belongs to the Sephardi Hebrew congregation was consecrated on 17th September 1980. You can find unique Jewish customs in this congregation.

Sofi Laakso

The theological course Abraham Goes Global is a cooperation between Åbo Akademi University and Stellenbosch University (South Africa) funded by the Finnish National Agency for Education and The Polin Institute 2023-2024 and 2024-2025. The aims are to widen the perception of theology to cross boundaries of religion at both universities, to exchange expertise on contextualised forms of religion, and to deepen the students’ and teachers’ understanding of interreligious and intercultural dynamics in religions. This blog text is the fourth of six blog texts to present reflections of the Finnish students visiting South Africa in February-March 2024.