Asher Matathias

Asher J. Matathias was a Greek-born Holocaust survivor, political science professor and unpaid Holocaust educator who spent most of his life in Woodmere, New York. He was born on 3 December 1943 in a cave on Mount Pelion near Volos, Greece, where his parents, Jacob and Nina (also known as Sara), had fled Nazi persecution. His father came from a Romaniote Jewish family; his mother was of Sephardic descent. Greek Christians, including Phroso and Yiorgos Stamos, helped the family hide. Matathias later recounted that a German patrol found them but a young German soldier chose to spare the infant and his parents, an episode that shaped his later refusal to assign collective guilt to all Germans for Nazi crimes.

After liberation the family endured poverty and the Greek Civil War. In 1956, when Asher was twelve, they emigrated to the United States with help from HIAS and other relief organisations and settled in the New York area. He became a lifelong resident of Woodmere on Long Island's Five Towns and a founding member of the Sephardic Temple in the Cedarhurst area. He remained active in both Jewish and Greek-American communal life, including the Magnesia Argonauts association and, as a delegate decades later, the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York.

Matathias taught political science at Manhattan College, Queens College of the City University of New York, and as an assistant professor at St. John's University in Queens. Students and colleagues knew him as the "Singing Professor," a nickname that reflected his warmth in the classroom as much as any formal title. Outside paid academic work he gave countless unpaid talks at schools and synagogues about Greek Jewry, the Holocaust, Israel and antisemitism. He served as president of B'nai B'rith Long Island Lodge 1353, wrote on those same themes, and completed a play about the Jews of Salonika. For him personal testimony was both a record of rescue in Greece and a warning about the consequences of persecution.

He married Anna in 1970 after meeting her in Greece; they wed thirteen days later and were married for fifty-six years. They raised three daughters, Miriam, Joy and Sara, and were grandparents to seven. He was survived by his wife, daughters and grandchildren, and by siblings including Dr Daniel Matathias and Rachelle; a sister, Maroula, had died of childhood leukemia at age eleven. At the time of his death the family was finishing a memoir project he had begun.

Asher Matathias died on Sunday, 13 September 2026, at the age of 82, surrounded by his wife, daughters and grandchildren. The funeral was held on 14 September at Boulevard-Riverside Chapels in Hewlett, New York, with burial at Mount Carmel Cemetery in Glendale, New York. Greek-American and Long Island Jewish communities remembered him as a survivor who turned a childhood of hiding into a lifetime of teaching.