As Bolton Hope Foundation we want to promote initiatives that contribute to the development of quality education both in Italy and abroad. To celebrate the founder of the Bolton Group we support the refurbishment, maintenance and development of the nursery and primary school of the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki, birthplace of Joseph Nissim.

The school is free and open to all children, regardless of their religion, their country of origin or their social class.

During a ceremony held on December 9, 2021, the school was named after the founder of the Bolton Group, Joseph Nissim.

Joseph Nissim was born in Thessaloniki in 1919, where he lived until the age of 18. He left Greece at the news of the Nazis occupation to enlist as a paratrooper with the Sacred Greek Battalion alongside General Montgomery’s British Eighth Army and participated in the Battle of El-Alamein in North Africa. At the end of the war, he was decorated with the Golden Cross for Military Valour by the Greek King George II for his heroic deeds.

In 1948 he moved to Italy where he began his long and brilliant successful entrepreneurial career and lived up to the age of 100 working to the last day with great passion, ingenuity, curiosity and courage. He was an innovator, a forerunner of the times and a lifelong fighter.

During the Second World War, Thessaloniki was the scene of the great tragedy of the deportation and extermination in the concentration camp of over 50,000 jews who lived in the city. Only 1.950 people survived the holocaust.

Today Thessaloniki is an important industrial, economic, cultural and university centre and is the second largest commercial port in Greece.

The Joseph Nissim Primary School includes an elementary school and a kindergarten for children over the age of three, attended by about 80 children. It is a school of excellence, equipped with the most advanced technological and creative means, open and inclusive, where, in addition to the national program, Hebrew, English, French, Jewish history and religion are taught.

As Joseph Nissim used to say, “you have to be curious, ambitious and free and always ask yourself the question: what have I learned today?”