The city of Chania, in northwestern Crete, was home to a small but venerable Jewish community prior to World War II. In 1944, its Jews were put on a boat with their ultimate destination being Auschwitz. A British submarine torpedoed the boat, killing them all. In 1999, Chania’s Etz Hayyim synagogue was rededicated under the auspices of Nicholas Stavroulakis, who has dedicated much of his life to preserving the remnants of Greek Jewry. As Liam Hoare writes, however, the synagogue still lacks a congregation:

Jewish life in Crete . . . predated the destruction of the Second Temple, the creation of the European Diaspora, and the birth of rabbinic and talmudic Judaism. Cretan Judaism and Greek Judaism more broadly developed its own Hellenistic character not only separate from the land of Israel but also from what would become Ashkenaz and Sepharad. . . . In Chania, for example, on Yom Kippur the book of Job was read in the synagogue not in Hebrew but in Greek—a tradition that Stavroulakis has resurrected. . . .

[S]ome of the people who use Etz Hayyim are not Jewish. For example, there are Christian residents of Chania who come from time to time on Shabbat or the high holidays. . . . Of those who use Etz Hayyim that are Jewish, [says Stavroulakis,] “Some of them are Jews who are of ambiguous backgrounds. They’re not Cretan Jews—they are from Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, [or are] of mixed North African background; they come to synagogue and are firm supporters. There are [also] Ashkenazim who don’t admit their Judaism anywhere and are able to come to terms with it through the synagogue.”

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.