Kehila Kedosha Janina, located in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, was founded by a community of Greek Jews who—unlike most of their Greek coreligionists—are not Sephardim but Romaniote. Marjorie Ingall writes:

The Romaniote are a people who view themselves as neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardi. According to their oral tradition, they’re descended from Jews who were put on a slave ship to Rome after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE; a storm grounded the ship in Greece, and there they stayed for 2,000 years. Their unique culture flowered. They didn’t speak Ladino, the Spanish-Hebrew hybrid language of Sephardi Jewry [who arrived in Greece later on]; they spoke their own Judeo-Greek language, sometimes called Yevanic—a mix of Greek, Hebrew, and Turkish with a few Spanish words thrown in. . . .

[D]uring the Middle Ages, Jews fleeing persecution in Italy, France, and Germany made their way to Greece as well, and, after 1492, they were joined by Sephardi Jews who had been expelled from Spain. Many Romaniote communities were absorbed into the broader, wealthier Sephardi culture. But Jews in the isolated town of Janina (or Ioannina), near Greece’s Albanian border, kept their Romaniote heritage alive.

These Jews wound up founding Kehila Kedosha Janina. They began arriving in New York shortly before the turn of the 20th century, during that period of American history when so many Jewish immigrants converged on the Lower East Side. They founded their congregation in 1906 and built the synagogue in 1927. . . .

Nearly 90 percent of Greek Jews died in the Holocaust. . . . Today, Greece suffers from the growing anti-Semitism that plagues much of Europe.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.