READ MORE ABOUT ANTISEMITISM IN THE GREEK CHURCH

The Greek Church still considers the Jews as guilty of deicide.

Metropolitan  Seraphim wrote, “Orthodox people are not racists and not atheists. We feel sympathy for the Jews as for all other people. The Jewish people gave us the Old Testament righteous ones and patriarchs, the apostles, the first Christians, the Theotokos, and the Lord… But as Orthodox, we are anti-Zionists. That is, we are against international Zionism, which has transformed the religion of the Old Testament into Satan worship… The Orthodox Church is against imperial Zionism, aspiring to global domination.”

Met. Seraphim may be extreme but he is not lonely alone in his church.

Of course Jews have lived in Greece since antiquity, but during Christian rule this was often impossible.  The largest community of around 20,000 Sephardic Jews only settled in Thessalonica after an invitation from the Ottoman Sultan in the 15th century. In 1913, the Greek government recognized Jews as Greek citizens with full rights and attributed Judaism the status of a recognized and protected religion. However, Jews were stlll listed as seprate group until 2000, the Greek government was obliged by the EU to remove the reference to “religion” from the national identity card. Leaders of the Orthodox when Church protested, saying the government was “bowing to Jewish pressure”.  The Archbishop (of Athens and All Greece) Christodoulos waged a campaign against the reforms and mobilized thousands of Greek citizens in mass protest rallies in Athens and Thessaloniki. These were followed by a series of antisemitic attacks motivated by notions of a “Jewish plot”, including the extensive desecration of Jewish cemeteries and the Athens synagogue, and the defacement of Jewish monuments and private properties with slogans as swastikas.