The Talmud teaches that to save a life is to save an entire world. Ninety-two-year-old Melpomeni Dina, from the town of Veria in northern Greece, is directly responsible for saving 40 worlds. The Mordechai family once lived in Veria, Greece, near Thessaloniki, where nearly the entire Jewish community was annihilated within a space of a few months, in one of the most brutal actions of the Nazis. In 1944, a year after the Nazis began rounding up Jews for deportation, Dina and her two older sisters, took 7 members of the Mordechai family into their single-room home to save their lives. In her own words, this is how she recounts the actions that saved their lives: “We were family. I thank G-d for keeping me alive to see them again. My sisters and I were not heroes, we were human beings and what was going on was inhuman.”
Header Image: Yad Vashem
