Shaily Lipa’s Shabbat clothes were always dusted with powdered sugar on Saturday mornings. Her grandparents Levana and Angel hosted the whole family for a Greek Shabbat breakfast on their balcony in Holon, a city south of Tel Aviv. Before the meal was served, Shaily and her cousins would steal sugar-dusted Greek butter cookies called kourabiedes from the secret stash their grandmother kept under her bed. But, the sugar that dusted their clothes always gave them away. 

“Shabbat breakfast was iconic,” explains Shaily, who is the author of “Yassou: The Simple, Seasonal Mediterranean Cooking of Greece.” Her grandmother covered her table with dishes her family brought with them from Greece in the 1930s, like the classic Greek salad horiatiki, individual spanakopitas stuffed with spinach, zingy white bean salad with lemon and vinegar, hard boiled eggs, creamy tzatziki, and taramosalata — the only item her grandmother bought at the market instead of preparing from scratch.  

Levana and Angel lived in Israel, but their world was Greek. “All of their friends were Greek — from Thessaloniki,” Shaily explains. They spoke Ladino amongst one another, played cards together on Friday nights, listened to Greek music, and ate Greek food. Most of their friends, she believes, were Holocaust survivors like her grandfather Angel. He was born in the Greek port city of Thessaloniki (Salonika), which was home to the largest Jewish community in Greece before World War II. Like most of the Jews of Thessaloniki, Angel’s family was deported to Auschwitz in 1943. 

His parents, two sisters, and one brother died; only Angel and his brother Dalio survived. However, the two were separated during the war and didn’t know that the other had survived until they both reached Puglia, Italy as refugees. Angel lived there in a home with several other Jewish refugees. Eager to find a place to pray, they converted one room into a small synagogue. Angel knew how to write in Hebrew and inscribed the parochet, a curtain that covers the Torak ark, for the small sanctuary. 

When Dalio heard that another member of his family was alive, he went to the home and spotted his brother’s handwriting on the ark, only to learn that Angel had left for Israel the day before. The two finally reunited in Israel and built new lives there — including the Shabbat breakfasts at Angel and Levana’s home.

Both of Shaily’s grandparents have passed away, but the memories of the Shabbat breakfasts remain strong and left a lasting impact on her life. Today, Shaily keeps her grandmother’s tradition going by hosting Greek Shabbat breakfasts when her family is together, making Greek salad, her grandmother’s white beans, and her own version of spanakopita, which she serves as a large pie. When she looks back at the Shabbats spent at her grandparents’ home, dusted in sugar, she says: “I think this is the reason I love Shabbat — thanks to them. I like to host and be social — these are the things I learned from them.”