Fromer, a writer and editor, co-founded Berkeley’s Judah L. Magnes Museum 36 years ago with husband Seymour.
The Sephardic story is “nowhere represented in the Holocaust museums in New York and Washington,” says Fromer, who writes about the Jews of Salonika in “The House by the Sea: A Portrait of the Holocaust in Greece.”
Salonika, a northern port city in Greece, was the birthplace of Fromer’s mother. Her father came from Monastir (now Bitola) in Macedonia, near the Greek border.
More than 50,000 Jews from Salonika were killed during the Nazi occupation. Nearly 67,000 Greek Jews were exterminated — about 90 percent of the Jewish population. Today only about 5,000 Jews remain in Greece.
Before the war, Fromer says, Sephardic Jews enjoyed a degree of freedom and peace with their neighbors the Ashkenazi didn’t.
“Salonika was one of the great centers of learning in Jewish life,” says Fromer, adding that the Jews were a dominant group. “Ladino was spoken everywhere. The city shut down on Shabbat. They were not ghettoized. They did not have the shtetl experience.”
As a result, while “the Eastern and Central Europeans who knew pogroms understood the enemy a whole lot more,” the Holocaust came as more of a shock to the Sephardim.
“They had the stability of nearly 500 years of living under Ottoman Empire. They were welcome citizens,” she says. “The ironic thing is the very security they had over centuries made them somewhat unprepared for the viciousness, the underhanded tactics of the SS and Gestapo.”
“The House by the Sea” is the true story of Elia Aelion, a Greek Holocaust survivor and the sole surviving member of his family.
The story is told in Aelion’s voice and chronicles his childhood in Salonika, where his father served as synagogue president.
“We were not especially religious,” he remembers, “but we were identified with and very respectful of tradition.” World War II changed his life forever, forcing him to leave Salonika, taking refuge at the Atlas Hotel in Athens, a refuge for Jews. He also hid out in a villa outside Athens. After liberation, Aelion returned to Salonika. In the book, he describes his visit to the house by the sea, where he spent his early years.
“At first sight its frame loomed before me, a coffinlike specter. Its spirit was gone and a palpable aura of death clung to it.”
Fromer has known Aelion for years as a member of the Bay Area Sephardic community, a community she describes as close-knit.
“We are family to one another,” she says.
Fromer feels that personal portraits, such as Aelion’s story, have a more profound impact on the reader than more detached history books.
“When you deal with 6 million killed you’re dealing with a number,” she says, “but when you deal with one person you’re dealing with specifics, the trial and the triumphs and that’s different.”