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In Turkey, a festival revives a jewel of the Sephardic world and aims to break stereotypes
IZMIR, Turkey (JTA) — Prague has the dubious honor of being chosen by Adolf Hitler to be a record of what he hoped would be the vanquished Jews of Europe. The Nazis left many of the city’s synagogues and Jewish sites relatively intact, intending to showcase them as the remnants of an extinct culture.
That has made Prague a popular tourist destination for both Jewish travelers and others interested in Jewish history since the fall of the Iron Curtain: the city provides an uncommon look into the pre-war infrastructure of Ashkenazi Europe.
Could Izmir, Turkey’s third largest city, become a Sephardic version, in terms of history and tourism? That’s the goal for Nesim Bencoya, director of the Izmir Jewish Heritage project.
The city, once known in Greek as Smyrna, has had a Jewish presence since antiquity, with early church documents mentioning Jews as far back as the second century AD. Like elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, though, its community grew exponentially with the influx of Sephardic Jews who came after their expulsion from Spain.
At its peak, the city was home to around 30,000 Jews and was the hometown of Jewish artists, writers and rabbis — from the esteemed Pallache and Algazii rabbinical families, to the musician Dario Marino, to the famously false messiah, Shabbetai Zevi, whose childhood home still stands in Izmir today.
Today, fewer than 1,300 remain. The establishment of the state of Israel, coupled with a century of economic and political upheaval, led to the immigration of the majority of Turkish Jewry.
“From the 17th century, Izmir was a center for Sephardic Jewry,” Bencoya told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We can’t recreate that, but we cannot forget that either.”
Izmir is located on Turkey’s Aegean coast. (David I. Klein)
Celebrating in the former Jewish quarter
Bencoya, who is in his late 60s, was born in Izmir but spent most of his adult life in Israel, where he led the Haifa Cinematheque, but he returned to Izmir 13 years ago to helm the heritage project, which has worked to highlight the the culture and history of Izmir’s Jewish community.
Over nine days in December that included the week of Hanukkah, thousands attended the annual Sephardic culture festival that he has organized since 2018. The festival included concerts of Jewish and Ladino music, traditional food tastings, lectures on Izmir’s Jewish community, and — since it coincided with Hanukkah and also a Shabbat — both a menorah lighting ceremony and havdalah ceremony were conducted with explanations from Izmir’s leading cantor, Nesim Beruchiel.
This year’s festival marked a turning point: it was the first in which organizers were able to show off several of the centuries-old synagogues that the project — with funding from the European Union and the local municipality — has been restoring.
The synagogues, most of which are clustered around a street still called Havra Sokak (havra being the Turkish spelling of the Hebrew word chevra, or congregation) represent a unique piece of cultural heritage.
Nesim Bencoya speaks from his office next to the restored Sinyora Synagogue in Izmir. (David I. Klein)
Once upon a time, the street was the heart of the Jewish quarter or “Juderia,” but today it is right in the middle of Izmir’s Kemeralti Bazaar, a bustling market district stretching over 150 acres where almost anything can be bought and sold. On Havra Sokak, the merchants hock fresh fruits, and hopefully fresher fish. One street to the south one can find all manner of leather goods; one to the north has markets for gold, silver and other precious metals; one to the west has coffee shops. In between them all are other shops selling everything from crafts to tchotchkes to kitchenware to lingerie.
Several mosques and a handful of churches dot the area, but the synagogues revive a unique character of the district that had been all but lost.
“The synagogues here were built under the light of Spain. But in Spain today, there are only two major historic synagogues, Toledo and Cordoba, and they are big ones. You don’t have smaller ones. Here we have six on one block, built with the memory of what was there by those who left Spain,” Bencoya said.
Those synagogues have been home to major events in Jewish history — such as when Shabbetei Zvi broke into Izmir’s Portuguese Synagogue one Sabbath morning, drove out his opponents and declared himself the messiah (he cultivated a large following but was later imprisoned and forced to convert to Islam). The synagogue, known in Turkish as Portekez, was among those restored by the project.
Today, only two of Izmir’s synagogues are in regular use by its Jewish community, but the others that were restored are now available as exhibition and event spaces.
Educating non-Jews
Hosting the festival within Izmir’s unique synagogues has an additional purpose, since the overwhelming majority of the attendees were not Jewish.
“Most of the people who come to the festival have never been to a synagogue, maybe a small percentage of them have met a Jew once in their lives,” Bencoya said.
That’s particularly important in a country where antisemitic beliefs are far from uncommon. In a 2015 study by the Anti-Defamation League, 71% of respondents from Turkey believe in some antisemitic stereotypes.
The festival included concerts of Jewish and Ladino music, traditional food tastings and lectures on Izmir’s Jewish community.(David I. Klein)
“This festival is not for Jewish people to know us, but for non-Jews,” Bencoya said. Now, “Hundreds of Turkish Muslim people have come to see us, to listen to our holidays and taste what we do.”
Kayra Ergen, a native of Izmir who attended a Ladino concert and menorah lighting event at the end of the festival, told JTA that until a year ago, he had no idea how Jewish Izmir once was.
“I know that Anatolia is a multicultural land, and also Turkey is, but this religion, by which I mean Jewish people, left this place a long time ago because of many bad events. But it’s good to remember these people, and their roots in Izmir,” Ergen said. “This is so sad and lame to say out loud, but I didn’t know about this — that only 70 years ago, 60% of this area here in Konak [the district around Kemeralti] was Jewish. Today I believe only 1,300 remain. This is not good. But we must do whatever we can and this festival is a good example of showing the love between cultures.”
“I think it’s good that we’re respecting each other in here,” said Zeynep Uslu, another native of Izmir. “A lot of different cultures and a lot of different people. It’s good that we’re together here celebrating something so special.”
Izmir’s history as a home for minorities has not been all rosy. At the end of the Ottoman period, the city was around half Greek, a tenth Jewish and a tenth Armenian, while the remainder were Turkish Muslims and an assortment of foreigners. In the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-1922 — remembered in Turkey as the Turkish War of Independence — the Greek and Armenian quarters of Izmir were burned to the ground after the Turkish army retook the city from the Greek forces, killing tens of thousands. A mass exodus of the survivors followed, but the Jewish and Muslim portions of the city were largely unharmed.
Izmir is not the only city in Turkey which has seen its synagogues restored in recent years. Notable projects are being completed in Edirne, a city on the Turkish western border near Bulgaria, and Kilis, on its southeastern border near Syria. Unlike Izmir, though, no Jews remain in either of those cities today, and many have accused the project of being a tool for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government to assuage accusations of antisemitism, without actually dealing with living Jews.
Losing Ladino and a ‘quiet’ mindset
Bencoya lamented that he is among the last generation for whom Ladino — the Judeo-Spanish language traditionally spoken by Sephardic Jews, but only spoken by tens of thousands today — was at least a part of his childhood.
“When you lose language, it’s not only technical, it’s not only vocabulary, it’s a whole world and a way of thinking,” Bencoya said.
The project is challenging a local Jewish mentality as well. Minority groups in Izmir, especially Jews, “have for a long time preferred not to be seen, not to be felt,” according to Bencoya.
That mindset has been codified in the Turkish Jewish community’s collective psyche in the form of a Ladino word, “kayedes,” which means something along the lines of “shhh,” “be quiet,” or “keep your head down.”
“This is the exact opposite that I want to do with this festival — to be felt, to raise awareness of my being,” Bencoya said.
The Bikur Holim Synagogue is one of the few still functioning in Izmir. (David I. Klein)
One way of doing that, he added, was having the festival refer to the community’s identity “as Yahudi and not Musevi!” Both are Turkish words that refer to Jews: the former having the same root as the English word Jew — the Hebrew word Yehuda or Judea — while the latter means “follower of Moses.”
“Yahudi, Musevi, Ibrani [meaning Hebrew, in Turkish] — they all mean the same thing, but in Turkey, they say Musevi because it sounds nicer,” Bencoya said. “To Yahudi there are a lot of negative superlatives — dirty Yahudi, filthy Yahudi, and this and that. So I insist on saying that I am Yahudi, because people have a lot of pre-judgements about the name Yahudi. So if you have prejudgements about me, let’s open them and talk about them.”
“I am not so romantic that I can eliminate all antisemitism, but if I can eliminate some of the prejudgements, then I can live a little more at peace,” he added.
So far, he feels the festival is a successful first step.
“The non-Jewish community of Izmir is fascinated,” Bencoya said. “If you look on Facebook and Instagram, they are talking about it, they are fighting over tickets, which sell out almost immediately.”
Now, he is only wondering how next year he will be able to fit more people into the small and aged synagogues.
“For Turkey, [the festival] is very important because Turkey can be among the enlightened nations of the world, only by being aware of the differences between groups of people, such as Jews, Christians, others, and Muslims,” he said.
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In the depths of Tel Aviv’s bus station, a fragile refuge for those with nowhere else to go during war
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — Two floors underground, past dumpsters and oil-laden puddles, through a reinforced Cold War-era door, a bomb shelter is buried underneath Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station.
Built in 1993 to accommodate more than 16,000 Israelis, the shelter found a new life during the Israel-Iran war as a public refuge for residents of Neve Shaanan, among Tel Aviv’s most diverse neighborhoods and one of its poorest, home mainly to asylum seekers and foreign workers.
With few other options for public shelters in south Tel Aviv, residents pitched tents in the squalor of a space that had fallen into disrepair — with pipes dripping and rats scurrying — for more than 38 days as Israel and Iran exchanged missile fire until a ceasefire that began on April 8 halted the fighting.
“It’s very difficult. Not just because of the war, but because of the conditions we’re living in,” Gloria Arca, who took refuge inside the shelter with her son, Noam, said in Spanish during an interview in April. “We’re protected from the missiles, but inside we’re not safe.”
For many Israelis, the bus station occupies a space that balances between nostalgia and revulsion. Until 2018, the station was a main node for travel into and out of Tel Aviv. Since then, ridership has dropped, and now the hulking structure is seen as little more than an eyesore. During Israel’s 12-day war with Iran last year, a short video by Israeli comedians went viral for sharing the station’s GPS coordinates in a video that jokingly urged Iran, “Please don’t bomb this bus station.”
Yet the station also offers a concrete window into Israel’s widening reliance on foreign workers, which has surged in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks.
When there is no war on, the shelter functions as a community center, complete with a Filipino church, a refugee health clinic, and retailers catering to customers in more than a dozen languages.
During wartime, the station takes on a new and vitally important role as a shelter for those who have none in their homes or neighborhoods, no family in the country whose homes they can flee to and little ability to pay for temporary accommodations somewhere safer.
Arca, who came to Israel more than two decades ago from Colombia and is in the country legally, knew that it would take her and Noam more than 10 minutes to get to a shelter from their home — longer than Israel’s advanced missile warning system allows. So they decided to move into the bus station, pitching a tent alongside some of their neighbors.
Depending on the day, more than 200 residents spent their nights in the shelter during the war, according to Sigal Rozen, public policy coordinator at the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants.
“It’s not easy, especially with young children and families with special needs,” she said. “You can’t get up in the middle of the night and just run.”
The Hotline, with funding from the Tel Aviv Municipality, worked to improve conditions in the shelter, but the starting point was dire. During a visit in April, rats could be seen scurrying across newly installed artificial turf meant to brighten the space, and mosquitoes landed on visitors’ ankles before being chased off.
More than anything, Arca worries about safety in the shelter — but not from the war. “We’re protected from the missiles, but inside, we’re not safe,” she said. “Security is there, but they don’t do their job. Drug users come in and use the bathrooms. There are many children here, and we’re afraid.”
The challenging conditions were nothing new to many of the people who moved in, who represent an often unseen but growing sector of workers in Israel.
The category of “foreign worker,” a term used in Israel to describe non-citizen laborers, most of them from countries such as the Philippines, India, and Thailand, who enter the country on temporary work visas tied to a specific employer, has long been a fraught designation.
Dominant in some industries, such as home health care, where there are so many foreign workers that the role is known as “filipina” in Hebrew, foreign workers have taken on greater shares of other sectors in recent years, particularly after Israel banned Palestinian workers from Gaza and the West Bank after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack. With Israelis increasingly reluctant to take low-paying manual labor jobs, the Israeli government has moved to fill the gap by permitting employers to hire more foreign workers.
Israel’s foreign worker population rose by 41% in 2024 alone to more than 156,000. By 2025, the total had reached 227,044. It is expected to grow even more in the coming years, as the government has set a ceiling of 300,000 workers.
For many Israelis, footage that circulated after the ceasefire showing long lines of foreign workers arriving at newly reopened government offices to renew their visas offered a stark illustration of the growing sector.
It is not uncommon around the world for people from impoverished countries to migrate to countries with more work and higher pay. For the workers, occupying a tenuous legal status can be worth it to be able to support their families, send their children to stronger schools and earn wages on a different scale than in their home countries.
Evelyn, a Filipina caregiver sheltering with her three children beneath the Central Bus Station, declined to give her last name out of fear of deportation. “In Israel, I can earn 10 times what I do in the Philippines. So I have money to send back to my family — not just taking care of my kids here, but my parents in Manila.”
But advocates for the workers say foreign worker status, and Israel’s increasing reliance on foreign workers, creates conditions that are ripe for abuse. Ohad Amar, executive director of Kav LaOved, a nonprofit that works to uphold equal labor rights for all workers in Israel, said the workers are “enduring conditions akin to modern slavery.”
Many foreign worker visas in Israel are tied to a specific employer and are non-transferable. Kav LaOved has documented numerous cases of delayed or unpaid wages, as well as workers who feel pressured to remain silent about abuse from their employers lest they lose their immigration status.
“Israel had not relied on migrant workers in the same way before. This is the first time at this scale,” Amar said. “Every day we are getting reports of workers’ rights violations, and we are completely overwhelmed.”
During wartime, foreign workers are frequently exposed to Israel’s unique dangers in extreme ways. On Oct. 7, as sirens blared, foreign workers were slaughtered in the fields of kibbutzes near Gaza. During the most recent war, videos circulated online of construction workers from China who filmed themselves stranded high in the air during missile barrages, afraid and without protection.
The first death in the latest round of fighting with Iran was Mary Anne Velasquez de Vera, a foreign worker in Israel from the Philippines. At the end of March, two other foreign workers were killed by a Hezbollah rocket while working in a field in northern Israel after they were unable to reach shelter.
Feeling physically vulnerable is an experience many foreign workers in Israel know well. Evelyn, a migrant from the Philippines who slept in the bus station with her children during the war, described how, in an industry as intimate as caregiving, working with elderly people who struggle to make it to a shelter, workers can feel pressured to stay in the building during an attack.
“They can’t exactly tell their employer they left grandma in the building during a missile attack, because they’ll get fired and lose their visa,” Amar said.
Some of the risks are much less visible. Evelyn was out of work as a housekeeper for the duration of the war, when her employer, an elderly woman, left the country. She lived on donations from community members and civil society organizations.
“Here is still better than back home,” she said. “But we are all struggling, and not just because of the shelter. If I can’t start working soon, I really don’t know what I will do.”
Workers like Evelyn who lack work visas must rely on informal employment, making them ineligible for compensation from Bituach Leumi, Israel’s national workers’ insurance, when they go unpaid. But having a visa did not solve the challenges of war, Rozen said.
The threat of losing their visa if they lose their employment hangs over the heads of the workers, forcing them into difficult decisions, like whether to leave their children with volunteers at the shelter or alone at home.
“Even those who still have work face a problem. If a single mother has children and there’s no school, where does she leave them? She can’t bring them along when there’s an alarm,” Rozen said. “So even when work exists, many can’t do it.”
She said the war had offered a glimpse into the as-yet-unaddressed challenges that come along with Israel’s increasing reliance on importing labor from abroad. The country’s labor market didn’t come to a standstill, as was the case in other countries in the region such as the United Arab Emirates where the vast majority of workers are migrants who tried to leave, but for Rozen, something new and troubling was laid bare.
“If you don’t want foreigners here, then don’t recruit them,” Rozen said. “But you can’t recruit them, triple their numbers, and then expect them to disappear when there’s a war.”
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Nearly half of young Americans view US relationship with Israel as a burden, survey finds
(JTA) — Nearly half of young Americans, 46%, believe that the United States’ relationship with Israel is mostly a burden to the United States, according to a new survey from the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School.
The Harvard Youth Poll, which polled 2,018 Americans aged 18 to 29, found that just 16% of those surveyed described the U.S. relationship with Israel as mostly a benefit.
Respondents were asked about their view of other U.S. alliances, including Canada, which 53% saw as beneficial, and Ukraine, which 21% saw as beneficial. Israel received the lowest perceived benefit of any country tested.
The survey also found that 55% of young Americans believe the U.S. military action in Iran is not in the best interest of the American people.
It comes as attitudes about Israel among young Americans in recent years have grown sharply negative. Earlier this month, a Pew Research Center survey found that 70% of Americans aged 18 to 49 held a somewhat or very negative opinion of Israel. That view was split among partisan lines, with 84% of Democrats in that demographic holding a negative view of Israel, compared to 57% of Republicans.
The Harvard survey was conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs between March 26 and April 3 and had a margin of error of 2.74 percentage points.
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Long Island father and teen son arrested after investigation into swastika drawn in school bathroom
(JTA) — A father and his teenage son were arrested Wednesday after an investigation into swastika graffiti at the teen’s school led police to search their home, where authorities said they found chemicals used to make explosives.
The arrests stemmed from an investigation into swastika graffiti found in a boys’ bathroom at Syosset High School on Long Island. After police determined that a 15-year-old student had drawn the swastika, the Nassau County Police Department sent officers to his home.
There, the teen told the officers about the explosive materials, according to prosecutors. He said his father had purchased the chemicals for him to build rockets.
During the subsequent search of the home, police found “highly unstable” materials that had been combined to make explosives, including nitroglycerin, multiple acids, oxidizers and fuels. They began to evacuate people in adjacent homes, fearing an explosion.
The teen was not identified by police due to his age. Francisco Sanles, 48, who was arrested at the scene, has pleaded not guilty to seven criminal counts, including criminal possession of a weapon and endangering the welfare of a child. His son was charged with five counts, including criminal possession of a weapon, criminal mischief, aggravated harassment and making graffiti.
Swastika graffiti is relatively commonplace in schools, with the Anti-Defamation League reporting over 400 incidents in 2024: Syosset High School itself was hit by a spate of antisemitic graffiti, including swastikas, in 2017. But it is relatively rare that incidents result in arrests.
In an email to the school district Wednesday night, the Syosset School District — which enrolls a large number of Jewish students — said its investigation had identified the student for the police, and he would face “serious consequences pursuant to the District’s Code of Conduct.”
“Antisemitism and hate speech have no place in our communities or in our schools,” the district said. “Syosset has long been proud of being a welcoming, empathetic, and inclusive community and those values remain firm. We protect those values and this community by confronting and holding accountable those who traffic in any form of hate.”
In January, New York City Police arrested and charged two 15-year-old boys suspected of spraying dozens of swastikas on a playground in a heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood with aggravated harassment and criminal mischief as a hate crime.
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