Odette Varon-Vassard
The research on this Hanukkah Lamp began in 2024 for a presentation at a commemorative day at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du judaïsme in Paris, dedicated to “Shmonzes: Objects of Memory”. It was part of an effort to reconstruct family history during the dark years of the Shoah. Initially, no recollection existed that an object in the Rousso family had truly played the role of shmonzes, a yiddish word for an often trivial but memory-laden object. However, a silver Hanukkah lamp (a menorah with eight branches) unexpectantly came to light (Fig. 1). It had long held a place on the top shelf of the living room cabinet in the family house where the author of this note grew up in Athens, and it kept that same place when the piece of furniture was passed down to the next generation.

Fig. 1. A Hannukah lamp on top of a cabinet in a family house in Athens (author’s photograph).
At first glance, this Hanukkah lamp may not qualify as a shmonzes. It didn’t play a role in the transmission of memory; nothing was ever shared about it with its inheritors. Moreover, it was far from “a trivial object”; rather it was a precious item. To light the Hanukkah candles, one had to use another lamp, simple, modern, metal one, brought from Israel in the 1960s. This lamp was practical and easy to clean after the candles had melted – since tradition requires the candles to burn completely.
But another reason prevented its use. Upon close inspection, it becomes clear that the lamp is severely damaged on the left side, with the shamash (the servant lamp) detached from the main body. As a result, it had to be hung to the side. During the eight nights of Hanukkah, an additional candle is lit each night –always beginning with the shamash, without which the ritual would be incomplete. No longer functional, the lamp became a decorative object. But unlike the rest of the silverware, it stood as the only visible sign of the family’s Jewish origins. It was a bearer of identity and memory at the same time, an object from another place and time that had shared the family’s history inscribed in its body.
One might wonder if it is becoming a shmonzes simply through the act of research and writing on it. For the first time, it is being reflected upon and connected to a deeper layer of another part of the family’s pre-war history, to old Salonika. It may have been originated from Spain, given the Sephardic origins of the Rousso family which possessed it. The elder generation of the Roussos spoke Judeo-Spanish, but did not have the legendary iron key to a house in Spain, an emblem many families carried with them on the road to exile. The large key was the quintessential shmonzes of Sephardic memory, to which Jorge Luis Borges dedicated a beautiful poem (Una llave en Salónica).
By chance, in a showcase at the Jewish Museum of Greece (Εβραϊκό Μουσείο της Ελλάδος, thereafter JMG), there is a very similar Hanukkah. It was a surprise to learn from curator Anastassia Loudarou that this lamp originates from Vienna, a type very common in Mitteleuropa! The description of the lamp at the JMG (Battinou, 2013, p. 88-89), reads :
Silver repoussé lamp, common Austro-Hungarian type in a Rococo revival style, characteristically decorated with motif of two rampant lions and the crowned Tablets of the Covenant, edged by rocaille pattern, provided with jug-form oil containers, probably from Vienna, late 19th – early 20th century. Used by a Corfiote family in Corfu, 1930s.
The lamp’s refillable reservoirs are shaped like oil containers, echoing the legend of the Maccabees. According to tradition, when searching through the ruins of the Old Temple, they found only one container of oil, barely enough to light the wick for one night. Yet a miracle occurred: the oil lasted for eight nights. This miracle is celebrated during Hanukkah by lighting one more wick each night for eight nights, or a candle in modern Hanukkah lamps.
It thus turned out that the Hanukkah lamp did not connect the Rousso family to its Spanish roots but to the Ashkenazim world, an unknown world for such a family. In a long interview with an elder member of the family, Louisa Rousso, frequent trips to Vienna were often recalled and everything became clearer.
Isac and Louisa Rousso, both natives of Bitola (Monastiri in Greek), a city in Serbia at the time and now in North Macedonia, married in 1925 and settled in Salonika, where they lived until 1940 (there was a wave of emigration of Jews from Monastir – the Monastirlis – to Salonika at that time). The railway connecting Salonika to Vienna since the late 19th century played a crucial role in opening the city to Central Europe. In the 1930s, Isac Rousso frequently traveled to import fabrics from Central Europe while his mother (or mother in law?) systematically went to Vienna for medical treatments, often accompanied by her children. It was likely during one of these trips that the Hanukkah lamp was brought back to Salonika. An identical model, originating from Berlin, and dated around 1890, can be found online (Fig. 2). This is what the lamp must have looked like when it proudly stood, unbroken, in the Rousso family’s salon in Salonika, an elegant marker of both cultural connection and personal history.

Fig. 2. A German silver plated Hanukkah Lamp Menorah circa 1890, the backplate embossed with two lions (Dawsons Auctioneers).
When Italy declared war on Greece on October 28, 1940, the Rousso family fled in haste to Athens taking the first available train. They settled there with their two children, and after the occupation, they lived in Athens with false papers until Italy’s capitulation on September 8, 1943. It is supposedly during one of his later trips, that Isac must have brought more items. Perhaps in December 1940, as Hanukkah approached, he brought the Hanukkah lamp. Isac’s decision to leave Salonika was the reason for the family’s survival, as they avoided the deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau that 96% of Salonika’s Jews (47,000 people) suffered. However, when the Germans became the sole occupying forces in Athens after Italy’s surrender, they decided to leave again. From September 1943 to October 1944, the Rousso family survived an incredible odyssey across the Peloponnese, thanks to the solidarity of many. It is unlikely they took the Hanukkah lamp with them on this perilous journey. More plausibly, they entrusted it, along with other valuables, to neighbors for safekeeping. In 1945, after the war’s end, the family settled permanently in Athens and recovered the items entrusted to these honest neighbors, as recounted by Louisa Rousso in her oral testimony. Another era, another life began in Athens—the city that had saved them—leaving behind what historian Mark Mazower has called “the city of ghosts.” The Hanukkah lamp, therefore, bears the scars of the traumatic period, a time when it had to be hidden, like the family itself, packed away among other items, in neighbors’ storage (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3. A closer look at the surviving Hanukkah lamp in an Athens’ living room (author’s photo).
Mutilated, it is not just a damaged object but a relic of an era from which neither people nor possessions emerged unscathed. It testifies to an entire past, being in a way a survivor of the Holocaust.
Bibliography
Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts. Christians, Muslims and Jews 1439-1950, London, New York, Toronto, and Sydney: Harper Perennial, 2005.
Catherine Pinguet, Salonique 1870-1920, Photographies de la Collection Pierre de Gigord, préface by Paul Salmona, Paris : CNRS Éditions, 2023.
Odette Varon-Vassard, Des Sépharades aux Juifs grecs. Histoire, mémoire et identité, new augmented edition, Paris : éditions Le Manuscrit, 2021.
Zanet Battinou et al., Guide book of the Jewish Museum of Greece, Athens: The Jewish Museum of Greece, 2013.
