Moses Elisaf

Moses Elisaf (Greek: Μωυσής Ελισάφ; born 17 July 1954) is a Greek pathologist, academic, and independent politician.

Biography

Elisaf was born in Ioannina in 1954 and graduated from the University of Athens in 1979. His parents were Holocaust survivors who managed to escape the roundup during which most of Ioannina's Jews were deported to Auschwitz; only 9% of the community survived. After liberation, many of the survivors suffered discrimination because they had been involved in communist resistance groups. Like most of the other Jews in Ioannina, Elisaf considers himself secular and does not observe Jewish religious law. Elisaf is a pathologist, a professor of internal medicine at Ioannina Medical School, and director of the Lipids, Atherosclerosis, Obesity and Diabetes Department. Between 1993 and 1994, he worked at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University. He has several relatives living in Israel.

He has been the president of the Romaniote Jewish community of Ioannina for more than a decade, and previously served as the president of the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece. Elisaf has also served on the city council and as the president of a cultural center. Running as an independent politician, he obtained 50.33% of the vote on the second round of the elections for mayor of Ioannina in June 2019. Elisaf says that he is a centrist and aims to build consensus around policies for the city's development, such as improving infrastructure and public services. During the campaign, political opponents claimed that he was a Mossad agent. Elisaf called the claims antisemitic and said that antisemitism in Greece is not serious. Elisaf is the first Jewish mayor in the history of Greece.