  hodes. The Island of Rhodes. The largest of the islands of the Aegean, has for many of us a very special meaning. It is much more that the place where our ancestors were born. It is much more that city that contained to a small Jewish district "The Judería" for almost 500 years where the community developed and grew, in an exemplary coexistence with other religions.
The Island of Rhodes is a place of an inexplicable sensation of having lived there. It is the cosy maternal bosom of a land with a rich and detailed history and with a culture that overflowed with letters, songs, religion, education, science, poetry and the feeling of home.
Rhodes is the way to the Promised Earth, the path to Jerusalem, imitating it irreverently, taking at times its place soon to give back the throne to the Holy City.
That is the inexplicable sensation that, those of us who are descendents of the “Rodeslis”, have. Our forefathers who were born in this idyllic place that nevertheless did not escape of the horrors of the criminal death camps.
More than the concrete facts - these pages also try to participate in reflecting the sensations, the emotion to sing a melody that resounded from the walls of the patios of the houses, to see themselves reflected in the water of the fuente de los hipocampos (the fountain of the seahorses), to feel the scent of the pan esponyado (sponge cake) as it left the old oven, “el forno de Josef”, to cross the Kai Ancha under a tenuous yellow light at night, to see the coming and going of the boats in the Mandraki, imagining them to be passing under the Colossus, to wave goodbye to some young person as he emigrates to a new land or to fight heroically against the crusaders at the Castle of the Grand Master.
Rhodes is not just that. It is not possible to watch Rhodes and only to see her. These pages, will not lack the steps that journey through the history of the Jewish town, the “España” that coexisted between the towns of the three monotheistic religions, the steps of the “Sefarad”, of the Sephardíc culture, the steps that in passing listens to the sweetness of Ladino, the judeo-spanish tongue, recurring across the Ottoman Empire, and in the Turkish, Greek and Italian cities where the Jews lived and coexisted like Salonica, Izmir, Istanbul or Cos.
To visit Rhodes is an unpredictable adventure that is worth the effort, to experiment, knowing that after doing so, one is no longer the same. |
adinokomunita is a mailing list in judeo-spanish that almost reunites a thousand of persons worldwide with the aim of 'chat' in electonic way - by email - in Judeo-spanish. In these pages they will be able to subscribe in a simple form and will find multimedia presentations of the two meetings (Israel 2007 and Istambul 2008) realised until the moment and acceding to the Ladinokomunita website. See section 
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