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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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The Gaza hostage crisis could forever change how American Jews relate to Israel — but it’s not too late to fix that
In the aftermath of the deadly terror attack at a Hanukkah party on Australia’s Bondi Beach, Jews who have watched the global surge in antisemitism with growing dread are once again considering the need to seek refuge in the Jewish state.
It’s a conclusion many native Israelis find bewildering. Oct. 7 and everything that followed has left them feeling deeply abandoned by a government they no longer trust to protect – or rescue – them. In the past two years, they are quick to note, more Jewish lives have been lost in Israel than anywhere else in the world. This disconnect over Jewish safety was shaped in no small part by the 251 men, women, and children taken hostage on Oct. 7 — and, perhaps even more profoundly, by the long, agonizing struggle to bring them back.
What began as a unified call to “Bring Them Home” soon split into two very different narratives. In Israel, public consensus collapsed as families increasingly blamed the government for sacrificing their loved ones on the altar of political survival, creating rifts that would eventually splinter not only the hostage movement but Israeli society itself.
In the United States, that dynamic played out very differently. Amidst rising hostilities coming from outside the Jewish community and deepening divisions forming within, the hostage rallies remained a source of solidarity, a respite from conflict rather than the source. But it also left many with a distorted view of events, further widening the already-existing gap between how American Jews relate to Israel and how Israelis understand themselves.
Few people are better positioned to explain that gap than one of the people who helped create it. Israeli-born Shany Granot-Lubaton is a longtime pro-democracy activist. After moving to New York City three years ago, she led protests there against the Israeli government’s 2023 judicial overhaul. On Oct. 7, Granot-Lubaton pivoted abruptly to hostage advocacy, eventually co-founding the American version of Israel’s Hostages and Missing Families Forum.
“Right away, I understood we would need a different approach from the way we spoke during the judicial overhaul protests,” Granot-Lubaton told the Forward. Her first priority, she said, was honoring the wishes of the families themselves. While far from a monolith, the majority believed messaging outside Israel should avoid overt confrontation with the government, even as some of those same family members were among its fiercest critics at home.
One of them was Udi Goren, whose cousin Tal Haimi was killed defending Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak on Oct. 7, his body abducted to Gaza. In Israel, Goren became one of the most active figures in the struggle, managing the Forum’s Knesset operations and confronting lawmakers directly. However, he fully supported taking a more restrained approach abroad.
“An effective public campaign is about leverage,” Goren said, in an interview with the Forward. “I didn’t see how attacking the Israeli government in the U.S. would motivate anyone with power to secure a deal to do it faster.”
With American politics becoming more polarized and the prospect of a second Trump term looming, the goal was to keep the tent wide and bipartisan — without completely absolving Netanyahu of responsibility.
“It was a fine line,” Granot-Lubaton recalled. “At every rally, we made sure to say — from the stage — that the Israeli government must do everything they can to bring them home. But we didn’t want to delve too deeply into accusations.”
There were other challenges as well. An open-tent structure inevitably included voices whose priorities did not fully align with the organizers’ carefully calibrated messaging. This included a new crop of influencers who positioned themselves as champions of the hostage cause, filling their feeds with “on-the-ground reporting” from rallies, vigils, and reunions. But their content also reflected personal worldviews and financial interests, dictating which parts of the story were amplified and which were left out. While some managed to remain politically neutral, others co-opted the cause to advance their own agendas.
For Goren, those tensions mattered less than the mission. Anyone advocating for the hostages was an ally — with one red line. “If you’re using this to spread Islamophobia or hatred against Arabs, you’re damaging the cause,” he said. “But beyond that, even if you were very conservative or right-wing — as long as your priority was bringing the hostages home — then for this campaign, you and I were in the same camp.”
The approach appeared to have worked. In the United States and across much of the diaspora, the hostage campaign remained unified.
But when Granot-Lubaton moved back to Israel with her family in 2024, she came face to face with a very different reality. Unlike the apolitical movement she and others had carefully cultivated back in the States, here the hostage struggle had become deeply politicized. Netanyahu and his allies, aided by sympathetic media outlets and an ideologically entrenched base, managed to paint the Bring Them Home campaign as a “leftist” project.
Families were forcibly removed from Knesset meetings, publicly attacked and delegitimized by ministers, harassed online and confronted in the streets; some were manhandled by police or even arrested. Conspiracy theories proliferated — including claims that some families were paid agents of the anti-government movement. In one particularly bizarre case, rumors circulated that hostage Matan Zangauker was not in captivity, but hiding out in Egypt.
On Oct. 13, 2025, the infighting briefly gave way to collective joy, as Israel welcomed home the last 20 living hostages. But the unity did not last. Before the hostages had even been released from the hospital, they and their families came under renewed vitriol — criticized for speaking against Netanyahu, for failing to sufficiently praise the IDF, and for asking the public for financial assistance.
It was a bitter twist of irony. The same acts that had come to symbolize anti-Israel extremism abroad — tearing down hostage posters, accusing hostages of lying — were now being carried out by Israelis themselves. And yet, so much of that derision has remained largely unacknowledged outside of Israel.
While Hamas is still holding the body of Master Sgt. Ran Gvili, the official campaign is over. Hostage Square has been dismantled. The Forum has shuttered its Tel Aviv headquarters and ended the weekly rallies. Goren, finally able to bury his beloved cousin, and Granot-Lubaton, now resettled in Israel, have begun new chapters in their lives.
Both stand by the strategy that shaped the movement abroad — but agree that what comes next must look different. The version of Israel that proved effective in mobilizing support overseas during the crisis now risks reinforcing a status quo many inside the country are fighting to change. And they are asking the same communities that rallied so powerfully for the hostages to engage just as seriously with the struggle over Israel’s future.
For Goren, that means pushing progressive Jews past their long-standing reluctance to “get their hands dirty” with Israeli politics. “Conservative and right-wing American Jews don’t hesitate for a second to get involved,” he asserted. “They get close to the government and the people in power. And they put their money where their mouth is.” He points to the Kohelet Policy Forum, whose American donors helped drive the judicial overhaul in Israel. “These are people that never lived in Israel a day in their lives, pushing the country towards a judicial coup,” he said. “We cannot afford to have Jews who care about Israeli democracy sit this one out.”
Granot-Lubaton shares the urgency, albeit with added empathy. “I don’t judge anyone who is uncomfortable speaking out loudly right now,” she noted. “You don’t need to be protesting in the streets. But you have to educate yourself. You have to talk to one another. Reach out to people who understand what’s happening here, invite them to speak in your synagogues.”
Responsibility, she added, cuts both ways. Israel’s pro-democracy movement must do more to meet American Jews where they are. “It’s not just translating content into English,” she said. “It’s understanding what Jewish communities are experiencing — and why challenging Israel feels so risky.”
But she categorically rejects the idea that Zionism and criticism are at odds. “I chose to come back and raise my children here,” she said. “Clearly I believe in this place. But the only way we can truly flourish is if we’re honest about what we’ve done and what we’re doing. I hope American Jews will join that movement. Unconditional love and support are no longer enough.”
The post The Gaza hostage crisis could forever change how American Jews relate to Israel — but it’s not too late to fix that appeared first on The Forward.
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VIDEO: Historian Vivi Laks tells history of the London Yiddish Press
די ייִדיש־ליגע האָט לעצטנס אַרויפֿגעשטעלט אַ ווידעאָ, וווּ די היסטאָריקערין וויווי לאַקס דערציילט וועגן דער אַמאָליקער ייִדישער פּרעסע אין לאָנדאָן.
צווישן 1884 און 1954 האָט די לאָנדאָנער פּרעסע אַרויסגעגעבן הונדערטער פֿעליעטאָנען פֿון אָרטיקע שרײַבערס וועגן אָרטיקן ייִדישן לעבן.
די קורצע דערציילונגען זענען סאַטיריש, קאָמיש און רירנדיק, אויף טשיקאַווע טעמעס ווי למשל קאַמפֿן אין דער היים צווישן די מינים; פּאָליטיק אין די קאַפֿעען, און ספֿרי־תּורה אויף די גאַסן. די דערציילונגען האָבן געשריבן סײַ גוט באַקאַנטע שרײַבער (למשל, מאָריס ווינטשעווסקי, יוסף־חיים ברענער און אסתּר קרייטמאַן), סײַ היפּש ווייניקער באַקאַנטע.
שבֿע צוקער, די ייִדיש־לערערין און מחבר פֿון אַ ייִדישן לערנבוך, פֿירט דעם שמועס מיט וויווי לאַקס. זיי וועלן פֿאָרלייענען אַ טייל פֿון די פֿעליעטאָנען אויף ענגליש און ייִדיש, און אַרומרעדן די טעמעס וואָס די פּרעסע האָט אַרויסגעהויבן.
וויווי לאַקס איז אַ היסטאָריקערין פֿון לאָנדאָנס ייִדישן „איסט־ענד“, ווי אויך אַן איבערזעצער און זינגערין. זי איז די מחברטע פֿון Whitechapel Noise און London Yiddishtown, ווי אויך אַקאַדעמישע און פּאָפּולערע אַרטיקלען. זי איז אַ קולטור־טוערין אין לאָנדאָן און האָט מיטאָרגאַניזירט סײַ דעם גרויסן ייִדישן פּאַראַד, סײַ דעם Yiddish Café Trust. זי זינגט פּאָפּולערע לידער אויפֿן „קאָקני־ייִדיש“ מיט די גרופּעס קלעזמער־קלאָב און קאַטשאַנעס, און פֿירט שפּאַצירטורן איבער דעם „איסט־ענד“.
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Puppet Monty Pickle is guest on the Forward’s ‘Yiddish Word of the Day’
It’s not every day that a kosher dill pickle puppet gets a chance to learn some Yiddish.
Monty Pickle, star of the children’s series The Monty Pickle Show, recently joined Rukhl Schaechter, host of the Forward’s YouTube series Yiddish Word of the Day, for an episode teaching viewers the Yiddish words for various wild animals.
Or as they’re called in Yiddish: vilde khayes.
The Monty Pickle Show, a puppet comedy on YouTube and TikTok, aims to show young viewers what it means to be Jewish in a fun, lively way. The series was created by the Emmy Award-winning producers of Sesame Street and Fraggle Rock.
So far, he’s met a number of Jewish personalities, including rabbis, musicians and chefs, and explored holidays like Rosh Hashanah, Hanukkah and Passover.
Sitting alongside Rukhl during the lesson, Monty eagerly tries to guess what each word means, providing for some very funny moments.
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