On the beach of Santa Maria al Bagno, August 1946. (From the collection of Paolo Pisacane)

Less than 80 km separate Santa Cesarea Terme, where DP Camp 36 was, from the other side of the Adriatic Sea. Looking carefully, one can see mountains towering above the horizon.

The ‘Porta d’Oriente‘ (Gate of the Orient) café in Santa Cesarea Terme still shows the Hebrew signs left by the refugees, who used it as a canteen during their stay in the village.

Rita Basile shows a UNRRA blanket she was given by a refugee.

A group of Jewish volunteers and locals seen in Villa Filograna in Santa Maria al Bagno, which was used as a canteen and a recreational centre. (From the collection of Paolo Pisacane)

Zvi Miller’s wall paintings at the museum of Santa Maria al Bagno.

Local actors from Tricase pose in their stage costumes for a play on the Jewish refugees.

Southern Italy

Jewish Refugees in Salento,
1945-1947

As the Second World War finally neared its end, millions of displaced people roamed Europe, including those few Jews who had survived the Holocaust and could not return to their homes, if they had any left. The victorious English and American armies, trying to sort some order out of the chaos, established hundreds of transit camps to house and manage these vast masses of people on the move and Salento, laying right in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, was a busy junction along many of these journeys.

A narrow peninsula stretching into the sea like an unfinished land bridge, Puglia has been a land of passage between west and east since time immemorial. It was here that Titus’ ships returned to after his legions laid waste to Jerusalem, bringing thousands of Jewish captives with them. Horrified at the prospect of being paraded in chains through the streets of Rome, some of the captives bought their freedom upon disembarking, settling in the coastal cities of Salento, and we can imagine them staring longingly across the sea, towards the land they had been exiled from.

Almost two-thousand years later, other Jews would stand on those same shores, about to embark on the opposite journey: between 1944 and 1947, thousands of Jewish refugees were housed in DP camps set up in four small sea resorts on the south-eastern coastline of this Southern Italian region, and the memory of that extraordinary encounter still reverberates across the villages.

Southern Italy

Jewish Refugees in Salento, 1945-1947

Jewish Refugees in Salento,
1945-1947