Kehilot (sing. kehilah) were quasi autonomous Jewish municipal corporations. The religious service of each kehilah was relegated to a synagogue. In Thessaloniki, each kehilah “was a town itself”. More than fifty Kehilot and the respecting synagogues were established in the urban core of the city in the late 15th and 16th centuries.
Alas, no remnant of Jewish cultural monuments survives.
Although a majority of the population of Thessaloniki was Jewish for the past four centuries, the word kehilot is unknown to modern Thessalonians. The Holocaust destroyed not only the lives of 50,000 Jewish Thessalonians, but also the buildings, the language, the tradition, even the memory of this city.