We visited this synagogue, Etz Chayyim, on our trip to Crete in 2008. It was a beautiful, tranquil, unpretentious place open to the public. Apparently, they used to boast that it was one of the last Jewish buildings in Europe (or elsewhere, for that matter) without 24/7 surveillance. This will change, of course, once they get the synagogue up and running again.

There aren’t many Jews in Crete. Most Greek Jews live in Athens. And there aren’t many of them there, either. Why anyone feels threatened by Jews is a mystery to me; why anyone feels threatened by a reconstructed synagogue (it had been used as a pigsty until the 1990s) is an equal mystery. The BBC reports.