HOLOCAUST MUSEUM HOUSTON

Art Circle members gathered for a fascinating and thought-provoking evening at McClain Gallery. Thank you to Robert McClain and his team for their warm hospitality, and to artists Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin for sharing their powerful work and insights. An inspiring night of art and conversation.

February 5, 1943: the Jews of Salonika (Thessaloniki), Greece were ordered to wear yellow stars.

For centuries before that, Salonika was one of the great Jewish cities of the world — a thriving Sephardic community shaped by Ladino language, scholarship, trade, and civic life. On the eve of the Holocaust, more than 50,000 Jews lived there.

And in less than six months, over 90% were murdered.

After the German occupation of Greece, restrictions escalated into forced labor, confiscations, humiliation — and then the final step: ghettos near the rail lines and deportations to Auschwitz. A vibrant world was nearly erased.

Salonika’s story is still too often overlooked, in part because it doesn’t fit the most familiar narratives of Holocaust memory. But remembering it matters. The Holocaust destroyed not only lives, but entire civilizations.