Executive Director

 

Charles J. Mouratides, the executive director of CHI – Circle for Hellas & Israel / International Friends for Greece-Israel Alliance, was born in Thessaloniki, Greece, and lives in Chicago. He served in recent years as the U.S. executive director and communications director of the World Council of Hellenes Abroad, the official Diaspora organization of Greece. For more than 30 years he was an award-winning newspaper reporter and editor, after he served as 2nd Lieutenant in the Greek Army, and received his first degree in American literature, and his graduate degree from Northwestern University’s Medill school of journalism. As head of the editorial department he supervised staff of more than 100 writers and editors for one of the largest chains of community newspapers in the U.S. He has also served as president and officer of Greek American organizations including the Pan-Macedonian Association of America.

During Charles’s many activities and long affiliation with the Jewish communities in the U.S. and in Greece, he was the co-founder of the American Friends of the Jewish Museum of Greece and treasurer of the group at which time he wrote and published a brochure on the museum and the Jewish community.

“I am amazed that it has taken more than half a century after the Second World War for such an Alliance to materialize,” Charles has commented. “I strongly believe that there are only benefits in this Alliance – for both parties. The rough patches in the relations between Greece and Israel during previous decades were the result of bigotry and outright ignorance of the two traditions.

“I was born in a Pontian refugee family in Thessaloniki, a city tagged “Crossroads of Civilizations,” where the Jewish culture gives the city both a colorful past and a tragic history. This city is the heart of the Greek Diaspora and knows how to welcome the refugees and the dispossesed whether they are coming from Europe or from Asia Minor. I am forever proud of, and fascinated by, Thessaloniki which the ancestors of the children of Israel, not that long ago, considered the ‘Mother of Israel.’

“Doesn’t this Alliance complete a cycle for the past two millennia which are the most recent (!) history of the Eastern Mediterranean?”