Approximately 87 percent of Greece’s Jews perished in the Holocaust, notes Elias Messinas. Ancient synagogues, cemeteries, and other community buildings were demolished or repurposed. In recent years, though, there have been efforts both to study and to re-establish the Hellenic Jewish communities that have their origins in antiquity.

Something is changing in Greece. The Jewish heritage sites once abandoned or demolished or serving other uses, are now slated for reconstruction and reuse as synagogues, nearly 80 years after the Holocaust.

Jewish communities—the Greek-speaking Romaniotes—were established in Greece in antiquity, in cities such as Ioannina and Halkis. Sephardi communities were established after 1492 [by refugees from Spain] in important Jewish centers such as Salonika (Thessaloniki) and throughout Greece—from Corfu to Rhodes and from Didimoticho to Crete.

In the mid-1940s, Kanaris Konstantinis, employee of the Hellenic Post, [the Greek postal service], and a representative of the newly established Central Board of Jewish Communities, traveled throughout Greece and documented in detail the state of the Jewish communities in the early years of reconstruction after the Holocaust. In the 1980s, Nicholas Stavroulakis the former director of the Jewish Museum of Greece, along with the photographer Timothy deVinney, undertook the first survey of Jewish sites in Greece, and documented through photography the synagogues and Jewish sites, a few since lost.

Ron Ben-Yishai, reporting from a visit to IDF forces in the Gaza Strip, analyzes the state of the fighting, and “the persistent challenge of eradicating an entrenched enemy in a complex urban terrain.”

Hamas, sensing the war’s end, is mounting a final effort to inflict casualties. The IDF now controls 65 percent of Gaza’s territory operationally, with observation, fire dominance, and relative freedom of movement, alongside systematic tunnel destruction. . . . Major P, a reserve company commander, says, “It’s frustrating to hear at home that we’re stagnating. The public doesn’t get that if we stop, Hamas will recover.”

Senior IDF officers cite two reasons for the slow progress: meticulous care to protect hostages, requiring cautious movement and constant intelligence gathering, and avoiding heavy losses, with 22 soldiers killed since June.

Two-and-a-half of Hamas’s five brigades have been dismantled, yet a new hostage deal and IDF withdrawal could allow Hamas to regroup. . . . Hamas is at its lowest military and governing point since its founding, reduced to a fragmented guerrilla force. Yet, without complete disarmament and infrastructure destruction, it could resurge as a threat in years.

At the same time, Ben-Yishai observes, not everything hangs on the IDF:

According to the Southern Command chief Major General Yaron Finkelman, the IDF is close to completing its objectives. In classical military terms, “defeat” means the enemy surrenders—but with a jihadist organization, the benchmark is its ability to operate against Israel.

Despite [the IDF’s] battlefield successes, the broader strategic outcome—especially regarding the hostages—now hinges on decisions from the political leadership. “We’ve done our part,” said a senior officer. “We’ve reached a crossroads where the government must decide where it wants to go—both on the hostage issue and on Gaza’s future.”