Holocaust Museum in Thessaloniki gets approval
The urban planning authority of Thessaloniki in northern Greece announced Wednesday that permission for the construction of a Holocaust museum in the city has been granted, and that construction will begin early next year.
It will be co-funded by the governments of Greece and Germany, as well as the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, and Albert Bourla, through the Genesis Prize Foundation
The work will be complete “in about two and a half years,” the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki (JCT) said, emphasizing that construction will be co-funded by the governments of Greece and Germany, as well as the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, and Albert Bourla, the Thessaloniki-born CEO of pharmaceutical and biotechnology corporation Pfizer, through the Genesis Prize Foundation.
The construction of the museum in the area of the old commercial railway was decided around a decade ago due to its historic significance. It was from there that the “death trains” transported over 50,000 Thessaloniki Jews to concentration camps during the 1941-1944 Axis occupation of Greece. It took a series of legislative changes and two presidential decrees in order to solve the myriad issues that resulted from the decision to build the museum, from ownership matters to what the land could be legally used for.
The architectural design of the building has been awarded to Greece’s P. Makridis & Associates, Israel’s EK A / Efrat Kowalsky Architects, and Germany’s Heide & von Beckerath, while the layout of the museum will be co-designed by the JCT and the Board of Jewish Studies of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
The work will be overseen in its entirety by the JCT, as the legal entity of public law. The museum is expected to represent a hallmark of Thessaloniki’s history, as the annihilation of its 50,000 Sephardic Jews represented the city’s “guilty secret.”
