Romaniote American Oral History Project
A community-sourced archive for preservation, research, and inspiration
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What does it mean to be a Romaniote Jew in the US in the 21st Century? After more than 100 years in America, Kehila Kedosha Janina is excited to launch this new research project to document our community today, exploring questions of identity, culture, preservation, and adaptation.
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We want to hear from you! Submit testimonies, family stories, recipes, photographs, traditions, songs, memories, and more. Contact Theo Canter at Theo@kkjsm.org to learn more and contribute your voice as we write the next chapter of our community’s story.
​Project Overview
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The Romaniote community has had a presence in Greece dating back millennia, with a rich, varied, and distinct Jewish existence despite their small size — both historically and especially after the Holocaust. There has been some historical and anthropological research on the community’s traditions and culture, both religious and social, but mostly focused on the community in Greece. There has been even less research produced to study the Romaniote community in America.
Kehila Kedosha Janina, the only Romaniote synagogue in the Western Hemisphere, is excited to launch the Romaniote American Oral History Project. KKJ will use the resources of our community network - numbering in the thousands, across regions and ages - to catalog highlights of more than a century of the Romaniote American experience. While remaining a strong community with links to our homeland across the ocean, Romaniote Americans have achieved a great level of both societal integration and economic success in a variety of fields, akin to other members of both the Greek-American and Jewish-American diasporas. Although many of our community members no longer have living family links to Greece, nor speak the Greek language of our ancestors, there remains a strong connection to our heritage, particularly the social and cultural traditions both inside and outside of the synagogue.
The following materials highlight common themes expressed by community members through dozens of interviews conducted for this project, including the themes of:
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Cultural Adaptation and Integration
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Language
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Food
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Passover
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Community Gatherings
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Religious Life
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These highlights reflect personal quotes, memories, family traditions, and facets of community members’ Romaniote identity.
Cultural Adaptation and Integration
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The Greek Jewish American community has been a part of, and reflective of, a parallel trajectory of the wider Greek-American community. From the early days on the Lower East Side, up to the present, members of our community maintained connections with their Greek Christian neighbors in New York as they all aimed to both integrate societally and preserve their native language, food, music, and way of life. Although over time the Greek Jewish community in America integrated within the larger society, in and out of the Jewish world, the memory of Greece remains a potent and inspiring force.
The first generation of Romaniote immigrants, who arrived with modest means in search of a better life, strove to assimilate into American society. In addition, they adapted to an American Jewish society dominated by Ashkenazi culture. As families moved beyond the Lower East Side, many attended Ashkenazi synagogues and schools, leading to the loss of some of the unique Greek Jewish traditions or their fusion with a new Americana.
​​“When they came to New York from Greece, my grandparents moved to Brighton Beach to be by water like they had been in Ioannina by the lake. When I was a child, my grandmother would take her coffee and sit in the living room, and I'd sit at her feet and say, ‘tell me stories of Greece.’ She painted a picture in my mind of what Ioannina was like. When my husband and I finally went there in 1972, a year after we got married, Ioannina was exactly as I had imagined it as a child.”
- Rhoda Elison Hirsch
Bar Mitzvah of Jimmy Ganis, 1952, Brooklyn
“We were a tight-knit family, though I didn't know much about my Greekness. My upbringing couldn’t have been more ordinary. My mom made a nice tri-tip steak, but we had no special Greek food as kids. I can’t think of anything in our home that was reminiscent of our heritage except for when we went to grandma and grandpa. Then it got ethnic and great. I loved my family, and I knew I was Greek, but it didn't mean very much to me when I was a kid. It sure as heck meant everything to my grandparents, especially around Passover when we’d all sit around and listen to my grandfather praying for hours and hours. We were just sitting there trying to understand how to get out of there.”
- Sid Ganis
“I used to live on the Upper West Side, and there was a Greek church on 91st Street around the corner. One time I passed by, they were having a big block party with live Greek music and dancing. Suddenly, I saw our Greek-Jewish family friend, Esther Cohen, dancing in the circle. She came up to me and she gestured around her and said, ‘Jimmy, we are all of this. And Jewish too!’”
- Jim Harris
“I go to a Greek restaurant in my neighborhood, and the owner’s parents are from Thessaloniki. Every time I go there, he seems to have another new Greek Jewish friend sitting there, and he’s so happy to introduce me, that we should all know each other just because we're Greek and Jewish. It makes me feel a strong pride. And at the same time, how our Romaniote culture is endangered. I want to protect it, to share our story. So many people, even in the Jewish world, don’t know we exist. And we are one big family, with a lot of love.”
- Lauren Meller
Lauren Meller and Liz Alderman in front of 295 Broome Street where the Ovadia family lived
Vintage Lower East Side Home Videos from the Eskononts Family 1950
“Of the kids that I went to high school with in Los Angeles, many of their parents were Holocaust survivors, and many of them didn't speak English. They were very nice people, but they spoke to me in Yiddish, and they seemed surprised, to put it nicely, that my family were Greek Jews. They tended not to understand. Growing up, I felt at least as comfortable with the Italians or the Greeks, having more in common with them in terms of food, tradition, and personality.”
- Kenny Solomon
Language
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The Greek language is a defining feature of the Romaniote community, both standard Greek as well as Yevanic, the traditional Judeo-Greek dialect spoken in Ioannina. A common theme expressed among many families is how the Greek language was used as a ‘secret’ language by the older generations to hide things from the children, as well as the increasing pressure of linguistic assimilation in America. With time, as it became spoken less as a native language in the home, Greek has remained a presence through words, sayings, and, in more recent years, as a language learned by descendants who want to reconnect with their roots. ​
“Both my parents grew up in households in which English was encouraged. My mother knew some Greek because she spoke Greek with her grandparents. My father knew less Greek than my mother. My parents would speak Greek when they didn't want us to understand. But my father would understand so little that he would say things like “Oh, you mean we're going shopping for the bicycle today?” So he would give away the secret.”
- Sandra Levy
“Romaniote, the word, comes from ‘little Romans.’ And our ancestors were spread not only in Greece but connected throughout the Mediterranean. My father spoke the Jewish dialect of Greek with his parents, which had influences from all around the region, and when he would speak to a Greek Christian, they would typically say, ‘boy, you have a very strange Greek.’”
- Kenny Solomon
“My father spoke Greek only off to the side with his siblings in a hushed tone, so we didn't know what they were saying. It was their secret language, but I loved listening to it. My father claimed there was a Greek word for every English word. And so growing up, I would ask him, What's the word for this? If he didn't know it, he'd make it up.”
- Mordy Eskononts
“The first Greek words that I learned were from my grandmother. She'd say to me, in Greek, “kalimera, thes kafe?” (good morning, want coffee?) And that's when I started drinking coffee. I was nine. I never learned to speak Greek as a child because it was a secret language. My mother's generation, although they understood Greek, didn't speak it because they wanted to assimilate. They were the generation who wanted to eat white bread sandwiches, to try and fit in, even though they didn't.”
- Ivy Sher
Ivy Sher’s mother, Becky Coffino, as a child, with her aunt and cousin
Food
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Whether for family gatherings, holidays, or daily life, the dining table serves as an important center of Greek-Jewish culture. Even as other cultural elements may have faded over time, food has remained a distinct way in which Romaniote Americans connect with their heritage, their past, and their community.
“On Thursday nights, we always had spaghetti and singatu. Friday night, we always had chicken. Since there was no cooking on Saturday, we always had lamb. I got some of those recipes from my sister. For many years, and I still do it now, when I'm together with my family, I always have a singatu dinner.”
- Rubin Battino
Rubin Battino cooking Singatu
“My grandmother had her homemade phyllo dough hanging off her shower rod. She made fresh Greek yogurt in the fridge in little cups. There was always kouloria, those sesame pastries that look like pinwheels and kourabiés in tins in the house.”
- Renee Motola
Renee Motola as a child with her family
“My mother was never a great cook. She was happy to put cornflakes and bananas on the table for dinner, and my father accepted it. But when it came to the holidays, she would make tomatoes yemistos (stuffed tomatoes with meat), fasoulakia (stewed green beans), bamia (okra), and keftedes (spiced meatballs). We would always start the Passover meal with minestra, which is an egg lemon soup. To this day, we always make it. And to break the fast after Yom Kippur we would have baklava and coffee.”
- Jim Harris
Koulouria
“Our father would make trips down to Halsted Street, in Chicago Greektown. He’d come back with loads of feta cheese, olives, olive oil, and other things — he definitely, like had a connection to the food. He was born right after his parents came from Greece, and didn’t have us until he was older, so he had a lot of traditions that he didn't fully pass down. But he talked about how his mother made challah every week, and he would talk about bourekas, chicken, and the little cookies that I only later learned were called bimuelos. He talked about this all so much that when my sister and I were kids, in the early 90s, sort of pre-internet, we went to the library and bought books to learn how to bake challah, because it just seemed like something so special that we should learn how to do. Kind of funny for like, two suburban kids at the time.”
- Alizah Salario
“From my childhood, I remember the foods quite vividly. My mother was a wonderful cook. One of the favorite things that she would make is yaprakia, which is like stuffed grape leaves and domates me kreas - meat and stuffed tomatoes. And all sorts of desserts: koulouria, baklava, kataif.”
- Sol Velelis
Stuffed Tomatoes