Ezra Bacola

[from a book by JH & JK:]

Ezra Bacola was born in Egypt around 1877 and as a teenager moved to Janina Greece where he was taken in by the COLCHAMIRO FAMILY. Here he met Dinah COLCHAMIRO and they were married about 1896 in Dina’s home. Soon after they were married, Ezra and Dina moved to Paramythia and became a successful businessman, very respected by the whole town. They had 9 children. While in Paramythia Dinah took very ill and she moved in with her brother ASSER and his family in Janina (around 1915) here her leg was amputated. But soon she was well and her husband came to Janina and took her home to Paramythia, (Preveza) in the Epiros District of Greece. (He took her back in a basket on a cart). This was not a hard thing for him to do, because Ezra was a very tall man, over 6 feet and when he wore his TURKISH FEZ, it was said, he appeared so tall that his children were afraid to cross him.

Anna Garty adds: "sadly, Dinah died shortly after giving birth to her 9th child, Sion, my father. I think Ezra, remarried but from what I know, all his children were born from his marriage to Dinah.

[According to the Yad Vashem Pages of Testimony submitted by Sion Bacola in 1978, Ezra was born in 1871. His parents were Bimbo and Menahem. He remarried after the death of Bimbo to Malkoula Mizan from Arta,Greece.] EPM

In 1941, Ezra Bacola moved to Janina. The family ran a textile business there. Sion and Leon were the only sons that were still unmarried during the Nazi occupation. All the rest, had families of their own. Unfortunately, only a few members of the great family of Ezra Bacola and Dinah survived the Holocaust.

1. Max who had emigrated to New York around 1914,

2. Bimbo, who was married to Shemo Cohen from Delvina, Albania and who lived in Corfu with their 4 children

3. Sion, who had fled to Palestine with his fiancée Emily Kabeli and her 2 brothers

4. Salvator, one of the sons of Yessula Bacola, who fled to the mountains, joined the Resistance and fought against the Nazis.

All the rest perished in the Nazi Camps. In fact, one of them, Nissim, survived the camps but died two days after the liberation as a result of … overeating.

Ezra's sons were all successful businessmen in the textile business until the Nazis came to Greece and in June 1944 took all of them to be burned in Auschwitz. Fathers, brothers, sisters, including their families. All were wiped out except for Sion and Bimbo and her family, who hid in the mountain caves while kind Gentiles fed them. Salvator the son of Yessula, also escaped, and Max.