Ioannina Mayor Moses Elisaf passes away at age 69

Ioannina Mayor Moses Elisaf passed away on Friday at the age of 69, after a battle with cancer.

He was elected as the mayor of the iconic lakeside city in mountainous northwest Greece in 2019, running as a widely-respected independent.

During his tenure, Prof. Elisaf picked up national and foreign distinctions for his efforts to achieve the municipality’s digital transformation, while also placing Ioannina on a list of the 100 climate neutral cities until 2030.

Elisaf, a noted professor of pathology at the University of Ioannina Medical School and director of a pathology department at the city’s university hospital, was the first Greek Jew to serve as a mayor in post-war Greece.

His parents were natives of Ioannina, part of the ancient Romaniote Jewish community in the city, the unofficial capital of the Epirus province. Elisaf’s parents survived the Holocaust by evading a notorious roundup of the city’s Jews by Nazi occupiers in 1943, and going underground until Greece’s liberation.