A festive trip to Congregation Kehila Kedosha Janina, the only Romaniote synagogue in the Western Hemisphere

This past Sunday, strings of Greek, Israeli and American flags danced in the breeze over a Lower East Side block. The air smelled of honey. Long lines of people waited to nosh on baklava and biscochos, a traditional Sephardic cookie. Under a big banner reading YASOU! a diverse crowd of Jews, Latinos, Chinese-Americans—along with the typical mix of white-sneaker-wearing fanny-pack-sporting tourists and local hipsters with expensive haircuts—listened to live bands rocking out with ouds and daoulis. (I especially enjoyed the awesomely-named Pontic Firebird, which plays dance music from the western Pontic zone of the Black Sea.)

The Greek Jewish festival was sponsored by Kehila Kedosha Janina, a tiny synagogue on Broome Street between Eldridge and Allen Streets. I’d passed it many times—it’s only a few blocks from my apartment—assuming that it was one of the many small shuls in the neighborhood that had become fancy condos. But no: Kehila Kedosha Janina is the only Romaniote synagogue in the Western Hemisphere.

The Romaniotes 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 2000 years. Their unique culture flowered. They didn’t speak Ladino, the Spanish-Hebrew hybrid language of Sephardic Jewry; they spoke their own Judeo-Greek language, sometimes called Yevanic—a mix of Greek, Hebrew and Turkish with a few Spanish words thrown in.