In the Old Town of Rhodes, a picturesque tourist destination in the Aegean Sea, stands a monument to a dark period in the island’s past. In the former “Djuderia,” the Jewish quarter, a marble obelisk commemorates the deportation of the island’s small but vibrant Sephardic Jewish community to Auschwitz-Birkenau on July 23, 1944.

The 1,700 Jews of Rhodes had the misfortune not only of experiencing deportation late in the war, when Allied victory was almost in sight, but also of enduring the longest journey of any Jewish community sent to Auschwitz — a treacherous voyage that lasted 24 days.

In July 2024, 80 years after the tragic deportation, scholars, government officials, community leaders and Jews from Rhodes and their descendants — known as Rhodeslís — gathered on the island, which has been part of Greece since 1947, for a week of commemorations. I participated as a historian from Seattle – home to a large Rhodeslí community – and as chair of the University of Washington’s Sephardic Studies Program.

The fate of the Jews on this remote island is testament to the scale and reach of the Holocaust: how the genocide of Jews remained a Nazi priority to the end, and the range of Jewish cultures decimated during the war. The Holocaust destroyed not only Yiddish culture of Eastern Europe, but also Ladino culture of the eastern Mediterranean.

Like many Jewish communities in the eastern Mediterranean, the Jews of Rhodes are Sephardic Jews, whose forebears were expelled from Spain in 1492 and settled in the Ottoman Empire.

While a Jewish presence on Rhodes dates to antiquity, around the second century B.C.E., the main Sephardic population emerged after the Ottomans conquered the island in 1522. Under the Ottoman Empire’s Sunni Muslim rulers, Jews on Rhodes paid special........

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