Wednesday night marked the start of Rosh Hashanah and a group of Jewish students on the program, myself included, wanted to experience a service in Athens. There are only around 15,000 Jews in Greece, but the program handbook had the address of an old synagogue in Athens, called Beth Shalom, which is Sephardic and Orthodox; knowing this, we all tried to dress as conservatively as possible, but discovered upon arrival that the dress code was all over the place (some were dressed up, some were in t-shirts). The service was all in Hebrew and Greek, and only last 30 minutes!
After the service, we were pleasantly suprised when the rabbi invited all of us (there were around 10 CYA kids there) to dinner. "It's really close," they said, and so we all (us plus a whole group of congregants) started walking. And walking. And walking. Part of the walk took us through what looked like an Arab neighborhood, and we felt nervous being in a group of what were obviously Jews (some of the men were wearing traditional Orthodox garb), but no one hassled us. We ended up a hotel, where it seemed like the whole congregation was having a big dinner celebration, and found ourselves at a table with an Israeli Jew studying in Athens, a French Jew studying in Athens, and a married couple from Israel (the wife was originally Ukrainian though) who had just moved to Athens. We had also met a Chilean student before services, but he ended up at another table. The prayers at dinner were pretty familiar, and it was crazy to look around and see all of us saying them together, but then going back to our respective first languages during dinner.
Happy New Year!
Temple Beth Shalom
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