A Holocaust Museum will open in 2026 in Thessaloniki (Greece), in memory of the city’s Jewish community, massacred during the Shoah. Work on the museum began in August 2024, ten years after the project was first mentioned. The building, designed by architectural firm Efrat-Kowalsky (Israel), Heide & von Beckerath (Germany) and Makridis Associates (Greece), will be built on the site of the former railway station where thousands of the city’s Jews were grouped together before their deportation to the camps. The museum will take the form of a gigantic octagon 32 meters high, spread over 8 floors covering an area of 850 m².
The museum will replace the small Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki, dedicated to Jewish history and built in 2001 by the municipality. This new museum will cover the history of the Jewish community as well as that of other communities present before the Second World War. It will notably retrace the history and culture of the Sephardic Jewish community.
Germany is one of the museum’s main donors with funding of $10 million (around 9.5 million euros). “With this museum we want to send a message against anti-Semitism and hatred,” said Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German president, when he visited the site last week during a state trip. The Greek government contributed $18 million (around 17 million euros), while $10 million came from private donors, including Albert Bourla, the chairman of Pfizer, whose parents survived the Holocaust and who donated a million dollars (around 950,000 euros).
Before the war, Thessaloniki was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in Greece, comprising 60% of the population. Jewish citizens were decimated after the arrival of the Nazis in April 1941: 50,000 people were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau from March 1943. Cultural and religious heritage suffered damage: Jewish property, including thousands of works art, were looted and the synagogues destroyed by the Nazis. By the end of the war, fewer than 2,000 Jews had survived in Thessaloniki. Throughout Greece, 90% of the Jewish population was deported to the gas chambers.
The opening of the museum is due to the initiative of Yiannis Boutaris, the former mayor of the city, committed to the fight against anti-Semitism, reports The Guardian. In 2014, the former elected official wore a yellow star as a sign of support for the Jewish community against the municipal councilors of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party (now defunct).
