Federal President of Germany Frank-Walter Steinmeier and President of the Hellenic Republic Katerina Sakellaropoulou paid a visit to the future Holocaust Museum of Greece in Thessaloniki on Tuesday.

The German president gave for the Museum an album with photographs from Ioannina (Yannena) that show the transport of Greek Romaniot Jews living there to the Nazi concentration camps. The album’s first photograph, he said, shows a young woman crying, foretelling her fate. President of the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece (KIS) and of the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki, David Saltiel, said on receiving the album that it will be the first historical document to be placed in the new Museum.

Steinmeier and Sakellaropoulou talked with two female survivors of the Holocaust from the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki – Rina Revah, 85, and Rosi Saltiel, 89 – and planted symbolically two pomegranate trees.

The spot where the future Museum will be built is where 50,000 Greek Jews “were loaded onto trains for animals,” while of the 50,000 deported Jews, “12,800 had fought in the Albanian front for their homeland,” Saltiel said in an address. “We are in Thessaloniki, that used to be called Madre de Israel, or Mother of Israel, which before the war held an outstanding position in the Sephardic Jewry of Europe, with numerous institutions, rabbinic schools and synagogues,” he added.

Saltiel welcomed the Greek president after her recent visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps, and the German president, whose focus and continuous interest in the Museum have been decisive. “The ties we have strengthened, the relations we have cultivated, are not simply an example of friendship, collaboration, and reconciliation, but of joint responsibility before history as well,” the head of KIS added.

The Museum to be built will stand as a beacon of light against racism and antisemitism and be a research and documentation center for all generations, Saltiel underlined, to include the histories of the Jews from all of Greece. He also thanked Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis for his undivided support to the donors of the Museum: the Greek state, the German state and President Steinmeier, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation and president Andreas Dracopoulos, the Genesis Prize Foundation, and Thessaloniki-born Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer. He also thanked the Municipality of Thessaloniki, the Region of Central Macedonia, and TrainOSE for their contributions in the Museum’s construction and the creation of a memorial park.

Project to begin 2025

Architect and head of the Makridis Associates office Petros Makridis, who also addressed the event, spoke of the Museum and said that the main concessionaire will be appointed in the first quarter of 2025, while the main construction work is slated to begin before April 2025. The Museum is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2027. The project went ahead mainly because of two people, Saltiel and former Thessaloniki mayor Yiannis Boutaris, he added.

German President Steinmeier is visiting Greece from October 29 to October 31, at the invitation of Greek President Sakellaropoulou. During his visit, the German president will visit Thessaloniki, Athens and Crete.

The visit to the future Museum’s site was scheduled to be followed by a discussion about the current state of German-Greek relations at the Goethe-Institut, with the participation of the former coach of Greece’s national soccer team, Otto Rehagel.
In the afternoon, Steinmeier was expected to travel to Athens and tour the Boehringer Ingelheim production site. A visit to the studio of artist Teo Triantafyllidis and a discussion with artists from the Athens Biennale are due to take place in the evening of Tuesday.