c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the senior interreligious adviser of the American Jewish Committee.)

(UNDATED) Deep-sea divers will soon be searching 300 feet below the Ionian Sea for 50 sealed chests of gold and jewels a Nazi leader stole from Greek Jews in 1944.

Much of the sunken treasure, estimated to be worth about $2 billion, was looted from the Jewish community of Thessalonika, or Salonika, during the World War II German occupation of Greece. Max Merten, the Nazi ruler of Salonika, stole the gold and jewelry from the city’s Jews just before he sent them off by train to Auschwitz and other death camps.

But of course Merten was simply following official policy.

Nazis may have hated Jews, but they surely loved their victims’ valuable possessions, including gold from rings and dental fillings, jewelry, silverware, automobiles, eyeglasses, artworks and real estate. Even Jewish hair was used to make German army blankets, and in some ghoulish cases, sadistic Nazis converted human skin into household lampshades.

When World War II began, 76,000 Jews lived in Greece, including 55,000 in Salonika alone, and 80 percent of them were murdered during the Holocaust. Today, the Central Jewish Council of Greece argues that the sunken treasure should be returned to the Jewish community from whom it was stolen 56 years ago.

Andreas Sefihas, the president of the Salonika Jewish community, said, “I alone had to pay him (Merten) 1,000 British sterling in hope of winning my father’s release from one of those camps.”

After Merten had filled 50 chests of stolen treasure, the wily Nazi placed his loot on a small sailing vessel and had it sunk at a precise location in the Ionian Sea. He planned to return to Greece after the war and reclaim his loot.

He did come back in 1958 but was arrested and imprisoned in Athens by the Greek authorities for his war crimes. Happily, Merten, who died in 1976, never got his hands on the stolen Jewish treasure. Now, after long bureaucratic delays, divers from Greece and France will attempt to reclaim the gold and jewelry.

Not surprisingly, with $2 billion at stake, everyone wants a piece of the action. The Greek government demands one-half of any treasure that is brought to the surface, and a man who is currently serving time in a Greek prison wants 25 percent because he learned of the treasure while sharing a jail cell with Merten in 1958. The financial backers of the diving operation are working on speculation, hoping they will make money from the film rights for the expedition. All this leaves the Greek Jewish community with only a quarter of any salvaged treasure.

A Greek Foreign Ministry official says the Central Jewish Council must present proof that Jews owned the gold and jewelry. That might be difficult since it is unlikely Merten and his Nazi henchmen gave the doomed victims official receipts for their gold and jewelry just before the trains left Salonika for the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

“This isn’t restitution,” an angry Sefihas says. “It’s a denial of history.”

Sefihas, whom I met in Salonika in 1996, is talking about more than recent history. He represents a proud and ancient Jewish community that predates the rise of Christianity. In our meeting he noted that when the apostle Paul came to the Macedonian capital city of Salonika in the year 53, he found a well-established Jewish community there. Indeed, Paul’s preaching in that city constitutes two books of the New Testament: First and Second Thessalonians.

Macedonia was the home of Philip and his famous son, Alexander the Great, who was a student of the Greek philosopher Aristotle. Despite Alexander’s brief life _ he died at 32 _ his influence as an empire builder was enormous and his tolerant policy toward Jews and Judaism is still revered in Salonika 2,300 years after his death.

That venerable community expanded after 1492 when many Jews who were expelled from Spain found haven in Salonika. Because it was one the first cities to have a Hebrew printing press (1513), Salonika attracted many scholars. When the Germans occupied the city in 1941, the city had more than 40 synagogues, countless libraries and schools, and Jews constituted a fifth of Salonika’s population.

Tragically, the Holocaust destroyed all of that, and today Sefihas and the rest of the Greek Jewish community number less than 5,000. One hopes that when the divers reach the surface of the sea with Merten’s 50 chests of stolen treasure, the descendants of the original owners will not be forgotten.

DEA END RUDIN