Occupation Historian Years active 26 | Name Rena Molho Role Historian | |
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Born June 1946 (age 69) Thessaloniki, Central Macedonia, Greece Books Salonica and Istanbul: Social, Political and Cultural Aspects of Jewish Life Alma mater Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, University of Strasbourg | ||
Rena Molho (1946) is a Greek historian who focuses on the different aspects of Ottoman and Greek Jewish history and culture and more specifically that of the Jews of Salonika.
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Early life and education
She was born in Thessaloniki, Greece, the original and official name of Salonika.
Molho studied European history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and received a Doctor of Philosophy with distinctions from the University of Strasbourg.
Career
She has taken part in many symposiums, television and radio programs, in Greece and abroad and has published her research in Greek and international scientific books, encyclopedias and journals. Her research has been supported with grants by the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture in New York City and by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in Los Angeles.
In 1996, she acted as senior interviewer and coordinator in Greece for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation and has videotaped seventy Greek holocaust survivors' personal accounts.
Molho has taught the history of the Jewish presence in Greece in seminars organized by the International Study Groups, and since 1991 with a group of other historians she co-founded the Society for the Study of Greek Jewry. For eight years, as of 1999, she taught the history of Greek Jewry at Panteion University in Athens, the first and only Greek academic institution to include the course of Jewish history in its curriculum in Greece until today. Her book The Jews of Thessaloniki, 1856–1919: A Unique Community received the Athens Academy Award in December 2000 and in 2001 it was published in Greek by Themelion Publishing. After this, it became a university handbook distributed to Greek students of Jewish history. This book has been translated and will be soon published in Turkish.
From 2005 to 2007, she was the Greek coordinator for Centropa([1]), a Vienna, Austria-based Jewish historical institute which conducted a new series of audio interviews of Thessaloniki-born survivors who after 1945 returned and settled in Greece.
She has published a great number of academic articles in all the major European languages as well as in Greek, Hebrew and Turkish.
In 2010, she was decorated with the medal of the order of Ordre des Palmes Académiques for her contribution to the French academia.
Among her latest books, Salonica-Istanbul: Social, Political and Cultural Aspects of Jewish Life (2005) comprises a collection of eighteen studies in English and French and was published by Isis Press.
Her book Jewish Sites in Thessaloniki: Brief History and Guide (2009), published by Lycabettus Press in Athens, became a best seller, and was also published in Greek (2010) and in German (2011).
Publications
A selection of her publications includes: