Haapalah / Aliyah Bet

Θεσσαλονίκη
Thessaloniki
Thessalonica
Σαλονίκη
Salonica
Selânik
سلانیك
Solun
Солун
Sãrunã

Around 315 BCE, Thessaloniki Θεσσαλονίκη was founded by the King Cassander of Macedon, on or near the site of the ancient town of Therma and 26 other local villages.
He named it after his wife, Thessalonike, half-sister of Alexander the Great.

During the Ottoman period, the city's Muslim and Jewish population grew.
The invitation to Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella, was an Ottoman demographic strategy to prevent the Greek element from dominating Selânik سلانیك.

By the 1680s, about 300 families of Sephardic Jews, followers of Sabbatai Zevi, had converted to Islam, becoming a sect known as the Dönmeh, and migrated to majority-Jewish Salonika, where they established an active community that thrived for about 250 years.

In 1917, fire destroyed the entire Jewish section of Thessaloniki Θεσσαλονίκη.
Robert D. Kaplan cites: ln the same year, '100,000 Greek refugees from Asia Minor - recently overrun by the Turkish army under a new nationalist leader.Mustafa Kemal "Ataturk" - were resettled in Salonika."

On April 22, 1941, Thessaloniki Θεσσαλονίκη fell to the forces of Nazi Germany, and remained under German occupation until October 30, 1944.
The Nazis implemented anti-Jewish laws, and turned the Baron Hirsch quarter of the city into a ghetto,
In 1943, 50,000 of Thessaloniki's Jews were deported to concentration camps, where most were murdered.
Eleven thousand Jews were deported to forced labor camps, most of whom perished.