Rachel Velelli Glaser and Rafael Alvarez

This is a Greek story. And a Jewish story. And a Baltimore story. Let’s start with the Baltimore angle since, more often than not, the Charm City lens provides the most humorous view.

Back in 1956 when Rachel Velelli Glaser was 8, her family from the Greek city of Patras was resettled by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society to transitional housing near Druid Hill Park. The social worker sent to help them began speaking to Rachel’s father in Yiddish. Emmanuel Velelli didn’t understand a word, prompting the perplexed woman to ask, “How can you be Jewish and not speak Yiddish?”

Because — Jew or gentile, and wherever they happen to be in their own far-flung Diaspora — the Greeks are unapologetically different.

“My father never drank schnapps, only ouzo,” said Glaser. “And every spring when the horta [wild, edible greens] bloomed, my mother would say, ‘Quick, let’s go pick it.’”

The agony of her parents’ lives was her mother’s loss of two sisters and their families when they were deported from Corfu to the Nazi death camps. Her father had two brothers forcibly conscripted by the Greek communists fighting the occupying Germans.

“I remember hearing my mother screaming in her sleep. It happened so much that we sort of got used to it,” Glaser recalled. “Whenever my mother heard the word ‘German’ or ‘Germany,’ she spat.”

Aside from those hardships, “The saddest part of my parents’ lives was the loss of shared values among Greeks,” said Glaser. “They missed the loud nights of parties when somebody starts singing and then everyone starts singing.”

The Velelli family are Romaniote Jews, distinctive from the Sephardim expelled by Spain in the late 15th century. The oldest Jewish community in Europe, the community’s roots precede the Christian era by several centuries. A Romaniote congregation in the town of Chalcis on the island of Euboea is one of Europe’s oldest active synagogues.

Greek immigration to Baltimore soared in the 1950s following the civil war between communists and the eventually victorious Royalists. Some 80,000 were killed in the 1946-49 conflict, with another 700,000 homeless and the streets of Athens piled high with those who starved to death. A few families of Greek Jews were settled here after World War II and about 20 individuals remain today, only two surviving from the immigrant generation of Glaser’s parents.

“The Greek Jews are such a forgotten population,” said Glaser, Beth Israel Congregation’s longtime education director. “Ninety percent of the Jews in Greece were killed by the Nazis.”

While eating vegetarian moussaka recently at Greektown’s Ikaros Restaurant, Glaser told stories about never feeling quite at home here — a Jew different from fellow Jews, a Greek different from most Greeks, a kid who landed in Cold War America knowing nothing of English.

It was at Ikaros in 2013 that Glaser’s mother, Emily, celebrated her 100th birthday, the last year of her life. “She even danced a little bit,” said Glaser, a 1966 graduate of Western High School. Glaser’s father, a bookkeeper for the Cat’s Paw Rubber Co. in South Baltimore (famous maker of shoe heels), died in 1993.

In the jumble of plotlines common to those displaced by World War II — coincidence to some, beshert to others — a Greek family responsible for the survival of the Velellis arrived in Baltimore a few years earlier. They were the Michalos clan, which hid eight members of the Velelli family at their winery in the mountain village of Michaleika. Though the Nazis burned all of Michaleika, the Velellis escaped.

Emily Velelli and Kathryn Michalos remained close friends until the end of their long lives. For years, the Velellis implored the Michalos patriarch — Kathryn’s husband, Elias, a Baltimore restaurant owner — to accept the honor of “Righteous Among The Nations” at Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial and museum. Elias eventually agreed, but died a decade before the accolade was bestowed upon him in 1985.

“They were the gateway for my parents in the United States,” said Glaser. “We would go to their house for secular holidays like Thanksgiving.”

Her family’s historian and the keeper of the story of Greek Jews in Baltimore, Glaser once wrote that she and her siblings “grew up understanding that were it not for the Michalos family, we would not be here today.”

Rafael Alvarez hosts the monthly “Readings with Ralphie” series at the Bird in Hand Café & Books in Charles Village. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com.

Photo of Rachel Velelli Glaser and the author at Ikaros Restaurant by Sean Scheidt

 

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