Zvi Koretz

Zvi Koretz ( Greek Τσβι Κόρετς Tsvi Kórets , also spelled Tzevi Koretz ; born on June 2, 1884 in Rzeszów , Austria-Hungary ; died on June 3, 1945 in Tröbitz ) was the chief rabbi of the Jewish community of Salonika in Greece from 1933 to 1945 .

Life

Born in Galicia , Koretz studied in Berlin at the University for the Science of Judaism , where he received his doctorate in philosophy and Semitic languages .

Grand Rabbi of Salonika

The Jewish community of Saloniki , with a Sephardic tradition, elected Koretz as rabbi in 1933 out of the desire to get a liberal, Ashkenazi rabbi. He learned Ladino , the language of the Salonika Jews, and began to reform the political organization of the community. He managed to establish close contacts with the Greek royal family and was friends with the authoritarian Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas . In the local Jewish press, Koretz was heavily criticized for his arrogance and lavish lifestyle. In 1938, Koretz was re-elected Grand Rabbi Salonikis.

Three days after the start of the Greek campaign , the Germans marched into Saloniki on April 9, 1941. On April 15, 1941, Koretz was arrested in Athens following a meeting with the leadership of the Jewish community because he had protested against the destruction of a church in the bombing of the German air force on Saloniki. He was then imprisoned near Vienna . Nine months later he came back to Salonika and became the Grand Rabbi of the community again. During 1942, Koretz was arrested following a dispute with the Nazi-dependent community president Shabbetai Shealtiel. Koretz was then released at the request of the industrialist Müller to take part in the negotiations to replace the Jewish slave laborers with paid Greek workers in his company. Together with other members of the committee convened for this purpose, Koretz succeeded in reaching an agreement with the Nazis regarding payment of a ransom to free these workers. He raised the necessary amount of money with the help of the Jewish communities of Salonika and Athens.

Deportation of the Jews from Salonika

In December 1942, the Grand Rabbi Koretz also became President of the Salonika Jewish Community, replacing the Shabbetai Shealtiel, which the Germans considered inefficient and incompetent. He thus became an important link between the Nazi headquarters and the Jewish community. The Jewish community was of the opinion that Koretz could conduct successful negotiations with the German authorities with the help of his knowledge of German.

He became convinced that the Nazis could be appeased by obedience without discussion and, in his dual role as rabbi and president, urged his community to obey the German instructions. The Nazi officers Alois Brunner and Dieter Wisliceny , who were entrusted with the deportation of the Salonika Jews, relied on Koretz's position of power in February 1943 to ensure that their directives for the grouping and deportation of Jews to Poland were properly implemented . They demanded two written reports a week from Koretz.

Before the Jews were transported from Salonika to the concentration camps, they were crammed into small buildings that had been built by Maurice de Hirsch at the end of the 19th century as emergency accommodation for Jewish refugees from Russia near the train station. This district was separated from the rest of the city by a high fence. There were three entrances marked in three languages ​​in German, Greek and Ladino, while searchlights and machine guns were installed from outside . Around 300 railroad cars were made available to transport the victims.

Koretz was accused of having blindly and hastily implemented the order of the Nazi headquarters, while he had not tried to prevent the deportation of his community, as the opposite example of the Athens rabbi Barzilaï showed. Koretz commented in a synagogue in Saloniki on March 17, 1943, three days after the start of the deportations, that everyone would be deported to Poland and there could begin a new life among their fellow believers. In order to give this claim some credibility, Polish banknotes were distributed among the deportees. Each person was not allowed to take more than 20 kilograms of personal belongings packed in bundles; Suitcases were not allowed. Koretz appealed to the rich to show solidarity with the poor, as rumors had surfaced that only the poor should be deported. He left the synagogue booing and under the protection of the Jewish police. Koretz tried to negotiate the return of the Jews destined for the camps and to get them assigned to the slave laborers in Greece, which risked his arrest by the Nazi rulers.

The Jewish cemetery in Tröbitz.

In the period from March 14 to August 7, 1943, 43,850 Jews were transported in 19 train transports. H. 95 percent of the Jewish population of Saloniki were deported, most of them to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp . Koretz himself was deported to the Bergen-Belsen residence camp in August 1943, together with his family and 74 community members, as well as 367 Jews who had Spanish citizenship , where he later fell ill with typhus . He was one of the more than 7,000 prisoners in the camp who were to be transported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in April 1945 and ended up as an inmate of the Lost Train in Tröbitz in Brandenburg , where, shortly after being rescued, he contracted typhus on June 3, 1945 died. His grave is in the local Jewish cemetery set up for the victims of the transport .

Ratings

The role that Koretz played in his capacity as chairman of the Judenrat is controversial. In the period immediately after the war, he was criticized by historians "for lack of leadership qualities". There were later attempts to revise this interpretation.
Raul Hilberg emphasizes : “It was an ideal tool for the German bureaucrats.” The deportation process in Salonika was carried out at an unprecedented pace, thanks to three men, namely SS Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny , War Administrator Max Merten and Zvi Koretz.

literature

• Minna Rozen: Jews and Greeks Remember Their Past: The Political Career of Tzevi Koretz (1933-43). In: Jewish Social Studies 12, 1 (2005), pp. 111–166.
• Steven B. Bowman: The agony of Greek Jews, 1940-1945 . Stanford University Press, Stanford 2009, ISBN 0-8047-5584-1 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Encyclopedia of the Holocaust ; Piper Verlag, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-492-22700-7 , Volume 2, p. 798.
2. ↑ Erika Arlt: The Jewish memorials Tröbitz, Wildgrube, Langennaundorf and Schilda in the Elbe-Elster district. Ed .: Elbe-Elster district. Herzberg n.d., p. 28.
3. ^ ^{A b c} Minna Rozen: Jews and Greeks Remember Their Past: The Political Career of Tzevi Koretz (1933-43). In: Jewish Social Studies. 12, 1 (2005), pp. 111-166.
4. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Rena Molho, La politique de l'Allemagne contre les juifs de Grèce: l'extermination de la communauté juive de Salonique (1941–1944) , In: Revue d'histoire de la Shoah 185, 2006 , Pp. 355-378.
5. ^ Mark Mazower , Salonica city of ghosts , p. 403.
6. ↑ Encyclopedia of the Holocaust . Piper Verlag, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-492-22700-7 , Volume III, p. 1257.
7. ^ Raul Hilberg: The annihilation of the European Jews. Frankfurt / M. 1990, ISBN 3-596-24417-X , Vol. 2, p. 740.