An artistic rendering of Don Isaac Abravanel August 1492. An armada of sorts anchors in the port of Naples. Nine Spanish caravels of the same class that will soon carry Columbus to the New World. However, these ships are laden with adventurers of another kind: a thousand Sephardic refugees, packed up like sardines in a can. A sympathetic onlooker watches them disembark. “They were like wraiths,” he will recall. “resembling corpses in all but the power of motion.”[1] Their Italian...

The Historic Casino of Rhodes By 1945, Jews were a rare sight in Rhodes. The Shoah had come over the island like a rogue wave in the night. In just a few short days, a thousand years of Jewish life and memory were swept into the sea, much of it lost forever. But in January of 1949, a different kind of Jew came up from the Aegean and strolled up to Rhode’s Grand Hotel of Roses. Today, this hotel persists as a dreary casino, but back then “The Roses” was bustling with activity. Government...

A previous issue of la Djente featured a review of my nonno Alfredo’s wartime diary, “We Are Here! We Are Alive!” (thank you Gloria Asher for the glowing review!). The diary sheds light on a network of unassuming heroes who saved my grandfather’s family from the Shoah. Yet this diary represents only a fragment of a much larger unpublished memoir, spanning Alfredo Sarano’s childhood in Izmir to his final years in Bene Berak. The bulk of that memoir unfolds in Rhodes to which the Sarano...