Holocaust Museum of Greece to open in Thessaloniki in 2026
Building will commemorate the nearly 50,000 Jews deported and murdered at Auschwitz during Nazi occupation
In February 1943, the tens of thousands of Sephardic Jews of Thessaloniki, (Salonika) Greece’s second largest city, were confined to a ghetto. Deportations started in March. By August, nearly 96% of the Jewish population had been murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz and Treblinka.
Decades later, an eight-story Shoah museum, located between the port, the historic White Tower, and the old railway station, is being built to commemorate the city’s pre-war Jewish community, of which less than 2,000 survived.
Funding for the $30 million project (£22 million) has come from the German government (over $10 million), the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, the Municipality of Thessaloniki, and private donors.
The octagonal building has been designed by a joint team of German, Israeli, and Greek architects. It will feature permanent and temporary exhibitions, archives, and extensive educational programmes dedicated to preserving the memory of the Holocaust, promoting respect for diversity, and defending human rights.
Welcoming the news, David Saltiel, president of Thessaloniki’s Jewish community, said: “Finally it’s happening—we’ve waited for this for so many years. This museum will be the voice for all those who were loaded onto the trains and never came back.”
In a statement, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation said: “The Holocaust Museum of Greece will highlight and pay tribute to the memory not only of the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki, but that of the 39 Jewish communities that existed in the country before the war.
“Its location near an Old Railway Station of Thessaloniki is significant; it is from there that Greek Jews were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps.”
The Holocaust Museum of Greece, honouring the Jews that made up more than a third of Thessaloniki’s population and shaped the city’s culture, commerce, and identity for over four centuries, opens to the public in 2026.
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