Moisis Elisaf, mayor of the northwestern Greek city of Ioannina and the first Greek-Jew to hold a mayoral position in the country died on Friday after a brief battle with cancer. He was 68.

Elisaf was born in 1954 in Ioannina. His parents were Holocaust survivors who managed to escape the roundups when most of the city’s Jews were deported to Auschwitz and murdered during the Nazi occupation of Greece.

He graduated from the School of Medicine, University of Athens in 1979 and specialized in pathology. He then worked at the Institute of Lipids and Atherosclerosis Research, Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, Sackler School of Medicine, University of Tel-Aviv, Israel (1993-1994).

He became a professor of Pathology in the medical school of the University of Ioannina and head of the pathology clinic in the city’s general hospital, and was also the president of the local Jewish community and a member of the Board of Directors of the Central Jewish Council of Greece.

Elisaf will be buried at at the Synagogue of Ioannina.

Ioannina’s Jewish community numbers just a few dozen people today, but was once the center of the unique 2,300 year-old Romaniote Jewish tradition. Romaniotes, who are neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardic, emerged from the first Jewish communities to settle in Europe.