Kehila Kedosha Janina, located in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, was founded by a community of Greek Jews who—unlike most of their Greek coreligionists—are not Sephardim but Romaniote. Marjorie Ingall writes:
The Romaniote are a people who view themselves as neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardi. According to their oral tradition, they’re descended from Jews who were put on a slave ship to Rome after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE; a storm grounded the ship in Greece, and there they stayed for 2,000 years. Their unique culture flowered. They didn’t speak Ladino, the Spanish-Hebrew hybrid language of Sephardi Jewry [who arrived in Greece later on]; they spoke their own Judeo-Greek language, sometimes called Yevanic—a mix of Greek, Hebrew, and Turkish with a few Spanish words thrown in. . . .
[D]uring the Middle Ages, Jews fleeing persecution in Italy, France, and Germany made their way to Greece as well, and, after 1492, they were joined by Sephardi Jews who had been expelled from Spain. Many Romaniote communities were absorbed into the broader, wealthier Sephardi culture. But Jews in the isolated town of Janina (or Ioannina), near Greece’s Albanian border, kept their Romaniote heritage alive.
These Jews wound up founding Kehila Kedosha Janina. They began arriving in New York shortly before the turn of the 20th century, during that period of American history when so many Jewish immigrants converged on the Lower East Side. They founded their congregation in 1906 and built the synagogue in 1927. . . .
Nearly 90 percent of Greek Jews died in the Holocaust. . . . Today, Greece suffers from the growing anti-Semitism that plagues much of Europe.
Read more on Tablet: http://tabletmag.com/scroll/191406/the-incredible-history-of-a-greek-jewish-shul-in-nyc