Lily Costi knows for sure that her family goes back at least five generations in Chalkida, Greece. “You can see their graves in the Jewish cemetery. Before that, I can’t be certain,” she said. 

In Chalkida, the Jewish cemetery has 600 graves, some dating back to the 14th century. There’s also a Holocaust Memorial. In 2000, the nearby street was renamed Greek Jewish Martyrs Street. 

Costi and I were in the Romaniote Jewish synagogue in Chalkida, an hour from Athens by train or by taxi from the airport. 

The Romaniote Jews are a Greek-speaking ethnic Jewish community, one of the oldest in Europe. The Jews who fled the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal in 1492 were newcomers in comparison. This is likely the oldest continuing Jewish community in Europe. 

Philo, first century, mentions the Jews on this island. So does Philo’s contemporary Josephus Flavius. 

Benjamin of Tudela mentions the Jews of Chalkida. In 1159, he noted the presence of 200 Jews in the city, mainly silk manufacturers and dyers. 

In the Chalkida collection of medieval and post-medieval sculptures in the Karababa Castle are three large 12th-century clay jars bearing inscriptions indicating that they belonged to a Jewish merchant. 

In the town’s park there’s a statue of a Jewish war hero named Mordechai Fitzi. 

Most important, in a country in which 60,000 of its 77,000 Jews perished in the Holocaust, the people of Chalkida saved most of its Jewish townsfolk. To be more specific, 303 of the 325 Jews survived the Nazis in this town. 

Chalkida and the Brown Beach Hotel 

My husband and I didn’t know any of this when we booked a hotel for a week, which included Shabbat and Shavuot, in Chalkida. In April, I received an offer from El Al’s frequent flyer club for half-price tickets in honor of my birthday. One of the possible destinations was Athens. At the same time, an advertisement popped up on my screen for the Brown Beach Hotel, an hour from Athens and recently renovated and turned kosher. The clincher was the photo of the private beach and swimming pool. 

Truth be told, we didn’t even know how to pronounce the name of the town, which is also called Chalkis and Chalcis. The “ch” is pronounced like a Hebrew letter het. That’s why it’s also spelled Halkida, if you’re searching online. Don’t confuse it with a small island called Chalki. Chalkida is the capital of the island of Evia (also called Euboea!), which is the second-largest Greek island after Crete. 

To get to Chalkida, you cross a bridge over the Euripus Strait. 

The water in Chalkida is famous. The water changes its flow direction at certain intervals, and it even stops flowing sometimes. This phenomenon has puzzled many a polymath over the decades, including a fourth-century BCE resident of Chalkida named Aristotle.  

We spent a sightseeing day in Athens, bought hats in the street market, drank frappé coffee, and hiked up to the Acropolis. 

Then we visited the Jewish Museum, a major theme of which is the catastrophic experience of Greek Jews in the Holocaust. 

Taxi drivers were on strike in Athens, but the Hellenic trains were running. When got to platform 10, my husband spotted an Israeli supermarket Osher Ad shopping bag belonging to young couple Rotem and Dana and their three children from Netanya. We bonded instantly. 

At the hotel, many of the guests had flown in from chilly European cities. The largest family group was from Vienna, with Uzbekistan roots. They are owners of kosher restaurants in Austria. 

Prayer services were organized by the young Israeli kosher supervisor, who now lives with his wife in Chalkida. 

On the way there, I’d read enough about Chalkida to stir up my fellow hotel guests to want to visit the historic synagogue, too. The staff of the hotel, though accommodating in all matters related to the hotel, were not yet apprised of the city’s treasured Jewish past. Rotem, who works in hi-tech, managed to contact the Chabad emissary in Athens, to reach the community representatives and set up a visit. 

SO THERE we were in the elegant, arched-roofed Chalkida synagogue, rebuilt in 1840 with the financial aid of a local duchess, after the building had been burned down. It’s in the center, physically and spiritually, of what was once the Jewish Quarter’s residences and commerce. The cypress tree in the synagogue courtyard dates back 400 years. Today, Chalkida has a population of 64,000 persons, among them 55 Jews. 

Costi, 60, owns a dress shop in town. “Before the war [WW II], Jewish families owned most of shops around the weekly open market area near the synagogue,” she said. “Our families had loyal customers in the forested mountain smaller towns and were eager to hide Jews despite the risk.” 

At the time of the Axis occupation of Greece in 1941, the country was divided into German, Bulgarian, and Italian zones. Athens and Chalkida were placed under relatively benevolent Italian rule. When Italy surrendered in 1943, German commanders took over Chalkida, demanding a list of the city’s Jews. 

The Greek Orthodox prelate Metropolitan Gregory handed in a list with only one name on it: his own. Many Jews, including a famous woman fighter named Sarika Yehoshua, belonged to the Greek National Liberation Front, EAM, which helped the Jews find shelter in isolated villages on Mount Dirfys. 

Before they fled, the Jewish men of Chalkida removed the centuries-old Torah scrolls from the ark. They chanted “Kaddish” and closed the synagogue. 

The Jews entrusted the Torah scrolls to the care of prelate Gregory. He held each of the seven Torah scrolls in his arms before hiding them all. Then the prelate urged the Jews to run for their lives. 

The 18 members of the congregation who were captured and murdered were victims of criminals collaborating with the Germans, Costi says. They are still being mourned. Every Friday night, family members bring olive oil to add to the eternal light in their memory. 

After the war, the survivors found that their homes and businesses had been ransacked by the Germans. Many moved to Israel. Those who have stayed gather for prayers on Friday night and holidays. On Yom Kippur, they include the most revered Grigorios of Chalkis, prelate Gregory, in “Yizkor” memorial prayers. 

Another interesting fact about Chalkida: It’s a famed location for Greek fish and seafood. 

The latter, including crustaceans and mollusks, would be of scant interest to us followers of Jewish dietary laws, were it not for one of the several explanations of the name of the city. Chalkida may relate to chalki, the pigment derived from the murex snail, a textile dye of great value in the ancient world. Indeed, Jews were involved in this dyeing industry, which included the production of royal blue, the techelet of the ritual tzitzit fringes. 

AFTER COMPARISON shopping, we had made our hotel reservations through booking.com, a general travel site without a Jewish connection. We received a friendly form letter from the hotel manager advising us that there would be certain adjustments because the hotel is now kosher, which means that no pork or shellfish will be served, that music and entertainment will be limited on Shabbat hours, and so on. I wondered how the handful of non-Jewish tourists who happened to book the hotel, only to find themselves amid kippah-wearing, blessings-singing Jews, were coping. On our last day there, I got the chance to ask. 

The Brown Beach Hotel weekday breakfast buffet includes an option to make your own traditional Greek cup of coffee. That involves filling a briki — what we’d call a finjan – with finely ground medium roast Arabic coffee and cold water. Then you dig a shallow hollow in heated sand filling a copper basin, place the briki in the hollow, and wait for the heated sand to boil the coffee. 

This takes patience. While I was waiting for my watched coffee to boil, I met a young couple from Warsaw. I asked them how they felt about being among these observant Jews. They said they found it “interesting,” and that they’d been to the hotel twice before, when it wasn’t kosher. 

“The first time, it was almost empty. I think the hotel is looking for its identity,” said the young woman. “And anyway, like a lot of people in Warsaw, I have some Jewish blood. One of my great-grandmothers was Jewish.” 

I couldn’t resist. “Oh, that’s fascinating. On which side?” 

“My mother’s mother’s mother,” she said. “But neither my grandmother nor my mother practiced Judaism at all.” 

“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’m happy to tell you that you’re actually Jewish, like all the people having breakfast here. By the way, what’s your name?” 

“Kaya,” she replied. 

“That’s Haya in Hebrew,” I told her. “A very strong name. A very important name. It means ‘life.’” 

Her eyes misted. Her voice thickened. 

“I never knew that,” she said. “That means so much to me. Life, you say? It’s life-changing for me to know that.” 

Didn’t she just tell me that the hotel was looking for its identity? Maybe not just the hotel. 

And the swimming we signed up for? Extraordinary. Gentle waves with a pier stretching into the blue Adriatic, plus a crystal clear pool surrounded by deck chairs. 

The pillow-rich rooms of the hotel have large balconies overlooking the sea, framed by those mountains where righteous gentiles saved our brethren. Above all this reign white clouds of glory. 

How joyous it is to find a town where our brethren have walked for 2,500 years and has been a safe haven in times of trouble. 

Who would have guessed?