Tel Aviv, 2014
My goal was to know what had happened and what is happening.
The book is in Hebrew. I was thinking for a long time about writing it, but I did not know how to go about it. After I retired, I started to discover the family roots and the origin of the group. I conducted extensive research about the Greek Jews with Spanish nationality like ourselves and met Professor Haim Avni whom you also met that evening. He researched this matter considerably and gave me some lists of places to go such as Yad Vashem, the National Library and so forth. I found the list of the three hundred and sixty seven Greek Jews of Spanish nationality that went to Bergen Belsen. And this gave me a lot of courage to start and learn where those people are. As I lived in a place where a large part of the group was also living, I started to take notes: This man lives there, this one does not live there, he got married… and so on and forth. I did extensive research. I also found the list of Jews who made it to Casablanca, because in Casablanca we were not the only ones. More Jews from Spain, Seville and many other places came there. I also found the list according to which people from Joint gave us money in Spain. All this I put in a frame: the name of the person, where is he there, where is he here, where is he.
[…]
What there is [in the book] is [material] on the family, the history of Greece and the Jews of Greece, everything is there… life in Tel Aviv, my studies, my marriage, the family of my wife and at the end there are all the pictures of what I do in Recanati Heritage Center. This is the book and that’s what it is about.
Many years, many years… I did not do all this in order to give these years away… My goal was to know what had happened and what is happening.
The book Back to Spain. The life story of a Holocaust survivor: Yehuda Saporta, written and edited by Ronit Keren, was recently published by The Salonika and Greece Jewry Heritage Center “Leon Recanati” (Petah Tikva, 2020). Photo on the book cover by Artemis Alcalay.