Greeks in Israel

The phrase “Greeks in Israel” can describe Greek nationals residing in the country, people of Greek ancestry, Greek Jews and their descendants, or people connected with Greek Orthodox institutions. These groups overlap in some individual and family histories, but they should not be treated as the same population. Membership in a Greek-named Christian church does not establish Greek ethnicity, and Israeli citizenship does not by itself indicate Jewish identity or Greek ancestry.[1][2]

One distinction recorded in a Greek textbook separates “Greek Jew” and “Greek Israelite,” meaning Jews of Greek origin, from “Israeli,” meaning a citizen of the modern State of Israel, who need not be Jewish. The wording is useful when interpreting the different labels in accounts of migration, religious communities, and citizenship.[1] The sources provide examples of each kind of connection, but no comprehensive census of Greek nationals or Greek-origin residents in Israel.

The most extensively documented modern strand is the migration of Greek Jews, particularly Salonikan Jews, to pre-state Palestine and Israel. The sources describe their contribution to urban neighborhoods, port work, and industry, as well as the arrival of Holocaust survivors and later descendants. A distinct strand concerns the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem: its senior hierarchy is Greek, while many local adherents and clergy are Arab and Arabic-speaking.[3][2]

The term also reaches back to ancient Hellenistic populations and Greek cultural influence in the Land of Israel. Those ancient communities are historical precursors to Greek presence in the region, not evidence of an uninterrupted or measurable modern ethnic population. Accordingly, ancient Hellenistic settlement, Greek Jewish migration, contemporary identity, and Orthodox institutions are presented separately.[4]

Following Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Land of Israel in 332 BCE, roughly 30 Hellenistic cities and military colonies developed in the region, bringing Greek language and culture. Some grew from established cities such as Akko and Jaffa; others formed from communities that included Greek immigrants, Macedonian mercenary soldiers, and local residents who adopted Greek cultural practices.[4]

These cities combined local religious practices with worship of Greek gods. Some had institutions associated with the Greek polis, including gymnasia and ephebeia, alongside public statues, competitions, assemblies, and coins bearing Greek inscriptions. The account describes residents of Greek origin as having first-class citizenship, while the rural population had inferior status; eastern poleis also depended on a ruling king for military protection and paid him taxes.[4]

Greek cultural influence did not spread uniformly. Hellenization proceeded more slowly in Judea, where a substantial independent farming class remained. The Hasmonean revolt began in 167 BCE amid conflict between Hellenizers and those seeking to preserve Torah law, alongside Antiochus IV’s decrees against Judaism. It developed into a war against Seleucid rule that also targeted Hellenistic cities; the account describes conquest, expulsion or forced conversion of inhabitants, and destruction of temples.[4]

Maresha, near Beit Guvrin, was an important center in Idumea whose community included Idumean citizens, Greek soldiers, and Sidonian immigrants. It became a non-Jewish settlement combining different cultures. John Hyrcanus conquered Maresha in 112 BCE and forcibly converted its Idumean inhabitants, according to the account; the city later declined and was destroyed in 40 BCE.[4]

Beth Shean was resettled in Alexander’s era and developed as a polis under the Greek name Nysa–Scythopolis. It was one of the Decapolis cities, described as centers of Greek-Roman culture whose inhabitants included Macedonians, Greeks, and people of other origins who adopted Greek culture. John Hyrcanus conquered the city in 107 BCE; the account says its inhabitants chose exile rather than conversion and that Jews were settled there.[4]

Greek merchants were present at Dor by the time of Alexander’s conquest, helping make the city Hellenistic. Dor later became a major fortified city and a center of shipbuilding and purple-dye production, as well as a stronghold of the Hellenized non-Jewish population. Alexander Jannaeus conquered it and annexed it to the Hasmonean kingdom; after the Roman conquest it became an autonomous Phoenician city.[4]

Hellenistic-period Ashkelon was a major seaport with a mixed population that included a large Jewish community. It retained its independence during the Roman period and became significant in the Greek cultural world: Greek writers, philosophers, and historians were born there. Greek divine names appeared on its coins, and the city’s worship of Astarte was associated with the Greek Aphrodite.[4]

Greek Jewish migration to Palestine included people from different cities and occupations, with Salonika (Thessaloniki) especially important as a source of immigration. Greek immigrants included shipping agents, shipyard workers, bankers, merchants, industrialists, journalists, and writers. Accounts credit them with helping establish several Tel Aviv neighborhoods, developing Haifa’s shipyard infrastructure and harbor facilities, and contributing to the local tobacco industry.[3]

Salonikan Jews became an important source of aliyah, particularly after World War I, and participated actively in the Sephardi community in Palestine. The Florentin quarter of Tel Aviv is identified as an outcome of Salonikan immigrants’ initiative. The Florentin, Recanati, Molcho, and Uzziel families are named among notable Salonikan families in the country; Leon Recanati founded Israel Discount Bank.[5]

A series of migrations connected Salonikan workers with ports and settlements. In 1924, more than 40 Salonikan fishermen immigrated to Palestine and initially settled in Acre. After the Arab riots of 1929, the group dispersed mainly to Haifa and Tel Aviv. Following Abba Khoushi’s 1933 visit to Salonika, 300 seamen, stevedores, porters, and their families immigrated and settled in Haifa; their arrival helped Jewish labor enter the port. In 1936, some moved to Tel Aviv and laid the foundations of its port.[5]

In 1937, a moshav ovedim of Greek settlers, some from Salonika, was established at Zur Moshe in the Sharon Plain. The Jewish Virtual Library reports that 15,000–18,000 Salonikan Jews immigrated to Eretz Israel during the 1930s.[5] A separate contemporary report, published in 1943 and later reproduced, attributed to Yosef Uziel an estimate that about 12,000 people from Salonika’s Jewish population of 70,000 had immigrated to Palestine. It placed 9,000 in Tel Aviv, 2,000 in Haifa, and the rest elsewhere, including Zur Moshe, and described aid efforts by the Union of Greek Immigrants in Palestine and an aid committee for Greek Jews.[6]

These figures refer to different accounts and periods and should not be combined as if they were a single census. The 1943 report gives a contemporary estimate of the number then living in Palestine, while the retrospective account gives an estimate for immigration across the 1930s. The sources do not reconcile their methods or scope.[5][6]

The broader background to migration included antisemitism and violence in Greece. An educational review identifies prewar Greek Jewish emigration to Palestine due to pogroms and antisemitism as a subject for future teaching, but supplies no total. It also reports that some Jews from Thessaloniki reached Palestine during the Holocaust with help from partisans.[1]

The Holocaust devastated Greek Jewry. A U.S. Department of State report estimates that 71,600 Jews lived in Greece when the Nazis invaded in 1941, that at least 58,885 were murdered, and that approximately 10,000 survived. It notes that comprehensive survivor statistics are unavailable because an undefined number left for Israel and the United States after World War II.[7]

The island of Zakynthos is an exceptional case in these accounts: all 275 Jewish residents survived World War II. When the German military governor demanded a registry of the island’s Jews, the mayor and bishop burned their list and presented a paper naming themselves as the island’s only two Jews. The National Library account says neither man was Jewish, and historian Yitzchak Kerem characterized the protection effort as an “invisible deliberate effort” to stall or avoid the Jews’ expulsion.[8]

After the Axis occupation ended, more than half of the 10,000 Jews who remained in Greece left for Israel and other countries. The figure includes remnants of Macedonian and Thracian Jewish communities, but the source does not specify how many of those who departed went to Israel.[9]

Survivors’ destinations varied. Yad Vashem describes most survivors of Salonika’s Jewish community as choosing to begin new lives in Israel, the United States, Canada, Australia, or South America; some first returned to Salonika hoping to find surviving relatives. Shlomo Cohen, born in Greece in 1920, was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and liberated from Bergen-Belsen by the British. He immigrated to Israel in 1946, recalling that he had registered for both Greece and Israel because he hoped to return to Greece and learn whether any family members had survived.[10]

Many Jews from Zakynthos later immigrated to Israel and established a synagogue in Tel Aviv, although the National Library account gives no count of those who settled there.[8] In Salonika itself, the Jewish population declined from about 2,000 in 1946 to about 1,500 in 1971 as a result of emigration to Israel and, to a lesser degree, other countries.[5]

A 1945–46 Survey of Palestine gives a separate snapshot of Greek wartime refugees in Palestine. It reports that roughly 14,000 Greeks were present early in 1945 and that most were repatriated between May and August. In a separate table, 300 Greeks were listed among refugees registered as wishing to return; the survey specifies that all Greeks in that table category were Jewish. The 300-person entry is not the total Greek refugee population, and the survey does not say that all of the approximately 14,000 Greeks were Jewish.[11]

The descendants of Greek Jews in Israel are not counted consistently across the available reports. A 2017 report estimated that 20,000 descendants of Greek-origin Holocaust survivors lived in Israel, without giving a counting method.[12] A 2026 Jerusalem Post opinion article gave an estimate of 55,000 descendants of Greek Jews.[13] These estimates describe differently worded groups, appeared years apart, and offer no shared methodology, so they should not be treated as directly comparable or as a current census of Greek nationals, Orthodox Christians, or survivors.

The 2026 account says many descendants have roots in Thessaloniki. It describes the city’s prewar Jewish community as numbering 56,000 and reports that more than 53,000 members were murdered in the Holocaust. It also notes that many Jews left Thessaloniki after a 1917 fire left more than 70,000 people homeless, including approximately 52,000 Sephardi Jews; some went to pre-state Israel.[13]

Greek citizenship measures have also affected Greek Jews and their descendants in Israel. A 2011 Greek law reinstated citizenship for Jews born in or before 1945; the World Jewish Congress estimated that about 300 people were affected. In 2017, Greece adopted an amendment allowing descendants of deceased Greek Jews to obtain citizenship, and the report said most of those descendants lived in Israel.[14] Eligibility for Greek citizenship is a legal connection to Greece and should not be confused with either Israeli citizenship or a count of the Greek-origin population.

A Jerusalem Post profile offers an example of movement in both directions. Greek-born rabbi Mordechai Frizis left Athens for Israel in 1995 after high school, later returned to Greece with his wife for four years of emissary work in Thessaloniki, and moved back to Israel in 2007 with their daughter. Frizis is involved in the Greek-Israeli community and gives Greek-language lessons. He said some learners were interested in Greek culture and others wanted to reconnect with their heritage; he also described the difficulty some people face when making aliyah without family support.[15]

The same report calls the Greek-Israeli community “small but active,” but provides no population or membership figure. It identifies an Association of Survivors of Concentration Camps of Greek Origin Living in Israel, whose stated aims include helping Israelis learn about the Holocaust in Greece and serving as “a point of contact between Greece and Israel.”[15] The American Jewish Committee has similarly described Greek Jews who resettled in Israel as forming “a bridge across the sea” between the two countries, without estimating the group’s size.[16]

In 2008, an organization for Greek-origin survivors of extermination camps was reported to meet weekly in Tel Aviv. Members discussed practical matters such as restitution forms and organizational bills, socialized over coffee, and spoke Ladino. The report estimated that about 250 death-camp survivors in Israel belonged to the organization at that time. A proposed heritage trip to Salonica and Auschwitz-Birkenau for survivors and their children had attracted about 80 sign-ups but was on hold while organizers sought a sponsor.[17]

The Jerusalem-focused material also points to a historical presence of immigrants and refugees from Greece, but gives no count or period-specific estimate. One Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs account says people from Greece settled in the city “throughout the ages.”[18] That description indicates a longstanding connection, not the size of a distinct Greek-origin population.

The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem is an autocephalous Eastern Orthodox patriarchate headquartered in Jerusalem. Its history and leadership are connected to Greece, but its adherents are not thereby an ethnic Greek population. Encyclopedia.com describes an Arabic-speaking community led by an almost exclusively Greek-speaking hierarchy, while the Jewish Virtual Library describes predominantly Arabic-speaking parishes served by Arab married priests and members of the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre.[2][19]

The bishop of Jerusalem received patriarchal dignity in 451. Since 1662, direction of Orthodox interests in the Holy Land has rested with the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre, which has sought to preserve the Patriarchate’s Hellenic institutional character.[19] The Greek character of the hierarchy and the Arabic-speaking character of many parishioners and clergy are therefore separate aspects of the institution.

The scale of Orthodox populations varies across accounts and dates. Encyclopedia.com reports about 37,000 Orthodox in Israel and the Israel-controlled territories in 1969. It describes lower married clergy as Arabic-speaking and the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre—then about 100 monks, almost all of Hellenic origin—as the dominant institutional force from which patriarchs, bishops, archimandrites, and other office-holders were elected.[2]

The Jewish Virtual Library gives an estimate of about 120,000 for the Greek Orthodox community across Jerusalem, the Galilee, Judea and Samaria, and Gaza, and describes the parishes as predominantly Arabic-speaking.[19] That estimate does not identify the community as ethnically Greek. Its geographic scope also differs from the older Encyclopedia.com figure, so the two should not be combined as directly comparable population counts.[2][19]

A 2022 Jerusalem Post report placed Jerusalem’s total Christian population at an unofficial figure of approximately 10,000, including clergy. It described the local Christian community as primarily Arab and Arabic-speaking while listing Greek Orthodox as one of the city’s longstanding church communities. It did not give a separate Greek Orthodox count or an ethnic profile for the congregation.[20]

Greek Catholic communities are another distinct religious category. Encyclopedia.com describes the Melkites as Arabic-speaking, Byzantine in rite, and Catholic in church allegiance. It gives a population of 26,500, including 23,500 in the Acre and Galilee diocese and smaller numbers in Jerusalem and the Israel-controlled territories. The Greek Catholic archdiocese in Galilee was established in 1752, and Greek Catholics in Jerusalem were placed under the Melkite patriarch of Antioch in 1772.[2] “Greek Catholic” here names a church tradition; the source does not present those figures as an ethnic Greek count.

The wider Christian population figures likewise do not provide a Greek demographic total. The U.S. Department of State’s 2023 report estimated Israel’s midyear population at nine million and reported 188,000 Christians. Central Bureau of Statistics figures cited there put 75.3 percent of Christians at Arab/Palestinian origin; non-Arab/Palestinian Christians were mainly people who emigrated from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. These are general Christian-population statistics, not a count of Greeks or Greek Orthodox members.[21]

A Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs account likewise distinguishes local Greek Orthodox Christian Arabs from Greek connections in church leadership and institutions. It describes a traditional Greek Orthodox local elite attached to the Patriarchate and Greek consulate, and says Jerusalem Christians lived in and around church monasteries, with many receiving food and lodging from their church; it supplies no separate population totals.[18]

Greek Jewish migration and the descendants who live in Israel contribute to social and family links between the two countries. The American Jewish Committee’s description of resettled Greek Jews as “a bridge across the sea” captures that connection, while the sources also document citizenship measures, community associations, language teaching, and movement between Greece and Israel.[16]

These links should be understood alongside the distinctions between ancestry, nationality, and religion. A person of Greek Jewish descent may be an Israeli citizen and may qualify for Greek citizenship under the measures described, but those categories do not apply automatically to all Greek Orthodox Christians or to all Israelis. The available reports identify individual examples and community initiatives, rather than a comprehensive profile or census of a single Greek-Israeli population.[14][15]

A contemporary reminder of Greek-Israeli dual nationality appeared in a report on the October 1, 2024 terrorist attack in Jaffa: casualties included a dual Greek–Israeli citizen. The report does not name the person or provide details about residence or background, so it establishes only that a person holding both citizenships was among the casualties.[22]

The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate has faced tensions between Greek leadership and local Arab adherents. A 2009 Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research presentation describes a long-running conflict and says the Greek leadership’s hegemony had recently been called into question; it gives no population figures for the groups involved.[23]

The presentation says Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, and Greece had been involved in attempts to influence the selection of a new patriarch and control of Patriarchate assets. It characterizes the resulting struggles as reducing the institution’s influence and power, while still calling it “the most senior of the Christian factors in Jerusalem.” These are the presentation’s characterizations of a politically sensitive institutional dispute.[23]

The presentation also says that, since 1967, local church leadership had undergone a growing process of Arabization and Palestinization, with local Palestinian religious leaders heading most of the churches it discusses. It identifies the Greek Orthodox Church as an exception to that broader trend because of the continuing struggle between its Arab adherents and Greek leadership.[23]

Land and property issues are another source of public attention, but institutional property holdings do not indicate how many Greeks live in Israel. A 2018 Globes report said the church owned 500 dunams in Jerusalem’s Nayot, Talbiya, and Valley of the Cross areas, leased to the Jewish National Fund for 99 years in the 1950s. Developers built 1,100 housing units on the land, which were leased to sub-tenants; some original occupants still lived there, and the leases were due to expire in 2050–51.[24]

A 2026 CTech report said the Patriarchate holds substantial land assets in Israel, particularly in Jerusalem, and that most were historically acquired in the 19th century. It repeated estimates from past reports that the Patriarchate owns nearly 40 percent of the land in East Jerusalem and that about 10 percent of West Jerusalem’s land was under Greek Orthodox Church control after Israel’s establishment. These are reported estimates about institutional holdings, not demographic figures.[25]

The U.S. Department of State’s 2023 report describes a dispute involving Ateret Cohanim and the Patriarchate’s claims to the New Imperial Hotel, Petra Hotel, and another Christian Quarter property. It says the Supreme Court rejected the Patriarchate’s appeal in 2022, exhausting the Church’s efforts to challenge a 2004 sale of leases.[21] The dispute concerns properties and leases, rather than the size or ethnic composition of Greek communities.

Public access during Orthodox Easter celebrations at Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre became disputed in 2023. For the Holy Fire celebrations on April 15, police restricted attendance, citing safety measures prompted by the 2021 Mount Meron stampede, in which 45 people died. Church leaders disputed the need for the restrictions, after which authorities agreed to allow approximately 2,200 Christians inside the church; more than 1,000 worshippers gathered in its courtyard.[21]

The report also describes clashes between police and some pilgrims trying to pass Old City checkpoints. The episode concerned safety, access, and relations between authorities, church leaders, and pilgrims at a major Christian celebration; it should not be read as a demographic account of Greeks in Israel.[21]