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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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A Jewish couple fell in love with rural Oklahoma. Then they built a cemetery there.
Linda Fitzerman did not want her children making burial decisions through tears.
For years, she and her husband, Todd Boone Fitzerman, told each other they needed to settle the question. They were not interested in cremation. They wanted a traditional Jewish burial. And they did not want their children, someday, to face the cost and pressure of deciding where that burial should take place.
“They just need to show up and cry,” Linda said. “They don’t need the additional pain of having to make financial decisions.”
The answer, when it came, was not one they had expected. They created a small Jewish burial ground in Sulphur, Oklahoma, a city of about 5,000 people in the Bible Belt, near the ranch the Fitzermans bought during the pandemic and had come to love.
At Oak Lawn Cemetery, a city-owned burial ground with green grass, rolling terrain and ponds, the Fitzermans purchased a group of plots to create a circular family burial section. Four corner pillars crowned with Stars of David mark the site. Beneath the grass, the pillars are connected by buried rebar, creating a distinct boundary around the section. Linda designed the stainless steel Stars of David, which a friend welded into place.
Nearby, five young trees are taking root: two Chinese pistache trees and three Autumn Blaze maples. The Fitzermans planted them with the city’s permission and have been carefully tending them for the past year, using large water barrels to help them through the early seasons.
“We are babysitting them for at least two years,” Linda said.
The burial section was dedicated in 2025. Todd’s brother, Rabbi Marc Boone Fitzerman of Tulsa, advised them on how to create a designated Jewish space within a public cemetery. Psalms and other prayers were recited at the site. There was no minyan, Todd said, but “spiritually we are there.”
To the Fitzermans’ knowledge, no other Jew is buried in Oak Lawn Cemetery.
A pandemic, and a plan
The cemetery project grew out of a life they did not plan to build in Oklahoma. Todd, 67, and Linda, 65, are both from the Detroit area and were raised in Conservative families. They met in Dallas when their children were young and have been married for 24 years. Dallas remains home. The couple still runs a business there, Local Oven, a gluten-free baking company.
But during the long uncertainty of the COVID pandemic, they began thinking about land.
“We felt so bottled up, and we wanted to get out,” Linda said.
They first responded to an advertisement for 10 acres near water in Texas. The search widened. Todd’s son suggested that 50 acres would be enough room to shoot on the property. Eventually, Todd found 158 acres outside Davis, Oklahoma, about two hours north of Dallas. They began building a working ranch. Todd’s son keeps cattle there. The Fitzermans now divide their time between Dallas and Oklahoma, spending roughly half the week in each place.
“It is a beautiful ranch,” Linda said. “It’s very calming to be out here, really beautiful, nothing like the city.”
Todd described hearing coyotes at night, watching the cattle roam, and the pleasure of “playing cowboy” for part of the week. Linda said she had not known, when they bought the land in 2021, “how important Oklahoma was going to be.”
“It was never a plan,” she said. “It just sort of evolved.”
Their relationship with the area deepened through the people they met there. Todd and Linda said one local friend, who lives across from Oak Lawn Cemetery and owns a large construction company, helped introduce them around Sulphur when they were new. He had also acquired plots in the cemetery through a trade arrangement for excavation work. Seeing what he had done opened a possibility they had not considered.
For years, Linda said, they had found “nothing intriguing” in Dallas cemeteries. Many Jewish plots cost $7,000 or $8,000. One cemetery with a Jewish section had plots priced around $36,000.
“Why would I spend money like that?” Linda said.
In Sulphur, plots were $300 each. For $4,500 total, they could create a family burial place tailored to them.
“We finally had an opportunity that just presented itself,” Linda said.
The circle layout itself came from her memory. In Michigan, she said, part of her family is buried in an older Jewish cemetery arranged not in straight rows, but in a circular shape.
“I thought that was really nice,” she said. “I liked it.”
So Linda and Todd approached the city and asked whether they could create a Jewish cemetery section in Oak Lawn. The response, they said, was strikingly easy.
“We shared that with the city and they said, ‘Yeah, sure,’” Linda said. “I’ve never seen any place give me the green light on every question.”
The city’s one practical concern was that everything remain level enough for its crews to mow. It allowed the Fitzermans to select the location, a corner where two cemetery roads meet. It also permitted them to plant the trees on easement land beside the plots.
“The city is 100% accepting,” Linda said.
Todd put it similarly. “The city could not have been more accommodating,” he said.
The Fitzermans say their religion has never been a problem. “It is the Baptist Bible Belt,” Linda said. “Everyone here has been so willing to accept us. They are inquisitive and curious. Our religion has not been an issue for anyone.”
Todd said that not everyone in Sulphur knows they are Jewish, “but lots of people know we are Jews.” When Todd’s son held his Jewish wedding on the ranch, he said, many non-Jewish guests had never attended one before. Friends asked questions. Guests wore kippot or cowboy hats. Tallitot belonging to Todd, his father and his son’s other grandfather formed the wedding canopy.
“There were more Jews in Sulphur for my son’s wedding than ever before,” Todd said.
Peace of mind
For Linda, the cemetery’s Jewish symbols were important. She wanted the pillars to be easy to find. More than that, she wanted them to say plainly what the site was.
“When we see the pillars, they reflect what we are doing, which is our religion,” she said. “Nothing is more stately than the Jewish star.”
“Our little decor, to me, sends a really beautiful statement,” she added. “I’ve always been proud to be Jewish. I wouldn’t want to be buried any other way.”
The Fitzermans have tried to spare their children as much uncertainty as possible. They have assigned the burial titles to their children and their children’s partners, while making clear that use of the plots will remain their choice. They have also documented the practical steps to follow when the time comes, including where a body could be prepared for Jewish burial in Dallas or Oklahoma City.
“You don’t think about it until a family member is going through it,” Linda said.
She views the cemetery as a natural extension of family care. “You are always, always part of your family,” she said. “If you want these, they are there for you.”
Todd described the burial ground in similar terms. It offers “peace of mind,” he said: a final resting place in a community they love and want to be part of.
The trees, Linda noted, will eventually grow large. The Chinese pistache trees can grow to over 25 feet with age. The maples, she said, will be especially beautiful in the fall.
They hope it will be many years before the cemetery is needed.
But the question that had lingered for so long has now been answered. Their children will not have to find a plot, compare prices, choose a cemetery, or wonder whether their parents’ burial wishes were honored.
They will only have to come.
And cry.
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Why Orthodox Jews are pushing back against permanent daylight saving time
(JTA) — For many Orthodox Jews, a typical winter weekday begins early: head to synagogue, gather in a minyan for morning prayers, then rush off to work.
Orthodox Jewish groups say a bill that would make daylight saving time permanent could upend that routine by pushing winter sunrises — and the earliest permissible time for some prayers — an hour later.
Agudath Israel of America is among the groups urging the Senate to reject legislation that would make daylight saving time permanent nationwide, arguing that the change would create both public safety risks and significant challenges for Orthodox Jewish religious life.
The House passed the Sunshine Protection Act on Tuesday by a wide bipartisan margin. In a statement issued after the vote, Agudath Israel said it understood the appeal of ending the twice-yearly clock changes but opposed making daylight saving time permanent.
The Orthodox advocacy organization warned that permanent daylight saving time would push winter sunrises past 9 a.m. in some parts of the country, forcing many children to travel to school before dawn. It also said the later sunrise would make it difficult for observant Jews to attend morning synagogue services and still arrive at work or school on time, because Jewish law prohibits reciting key morning prayers before prescribed times tied to sunrise.
“The extension of DST will create an extreme hardship on observant Jews,” the organization said. “It would be extraordinarily difficult — if not impossible — to arrive on time for a job and will affect the start time of our schools.”
The Orthodox Union and the Coalition for Jewish Values have also come out against the measure.
In a column for Chabad.org that didn’t take a position on the bill, Menachem Posner also wrote that the change would present a challenge in parts of the country for morning minyan, the 10-person prayer quorum. But he also noted an upside to the extension of daylight saving: a later start time for Shabbat on short winter Fridays.
Shabbat begins at sundown, which during the winter can fall before 4:00 p.m. in parts of the country. “With DST, however, this will be shifted one hour later, so that even on the darkest day of winter, Jews will have one more hour to prepare for Shabbat,” Posner wrote.
Orthodox parties in Israel have also made an issue of changes to the daylight saving calendar. In 2011, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet unanimously approved extending daylight saving time until the first Sunday after Oct. 1, despite objections from haredi parties. The change brought Israel’s clock closer to European practice while still acknowledging Orthodox concerns about morning prayer and a later start time to Yom Kippur that they argued would make the fast more difficult.
This week Agudath Israel also pointed to the brief U.S. experiment with year-round daylight saving time during the 1970s energy crisis, when Congress repealed the policy after widespread public dissatisfaction over dark winter mornings.
The organization said it hoped the Senate would weigh the broader consequences of permanent daylight saving time, including alternatives such as permanent standard time or retaining the current system of seasonal clock changes.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Why Orthodox Jews are pushing back against permanent daylight saving time appeared first on The Forward.
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Colombia and Slovenia recently recognized a Palestinian state. Now they’re moving their embassies to Jerusalem.
(JTA) — JERUSALEM — Colombia, the world’s second most populous Spanish-speaking nation after Mexico, has little in common with landlocked Slovenia, the second-smallest of the six republics that once comprised Yugoslavia.
But when it comes to their stance on Israel, the parallels are hard to ignore.
Within one month of each other, leftist, pro-Palestine governments in both countries were voted out of office and replaced by right-wing leaders who vowed not only to restore full diplomatic relations with Israel but also inaugurate embassies in Jerusalem.
In fact, Colombia’s next foreign minister, Omar Bola Escobar, promised exactly that Wednesday during a meeting in Washington, D.C., with his Israeli counterpart, Gideon Saar. That followed a declaration by President-elect Abelardo de la Espriella that Colombia would establish relations “like never before” with Israel once he takes the oath of office on Aug. 7.
In June 2024, the parliament of Slovenia — an Alpine republic of 2.1 million — voted to recognize a Palestinian state only a week after Spain, Ireland and Norway had done the same thing. But half a year later, it went further. Slovenian public broadcaster RTV, citing the ongoing war in Gaza, became the first in Europe to demand Israel’s exclusion from the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest.
Then last year, Slovenia under Prime Minister Robert Golob banned all imports from Jewish settlements in the West Bank as well as all weapons trade with Israel — the first member of the European Union to do so. And this past June, RTV not only boycotted Eurovision altogether but aired films about Palestine instead.
That anti-Israel campaign made life uncomfortable for the country’s 100 or so Jews, said Robert Waltl, president of the Ljubljana-based Liberal Jewish Community of Slovenia.
But on May 22, Janez Jansa — leader of the Slovenian Democratic Party and an admirer of U.S. President Donald Trump — formed a winning coalition with other right-wing parties following the country’s parliamentary elections, clearing the way for Jansa to replace Golob as prime minister.
In a striking about-face, Janza immediately announced that Slovenia would cancel its previous recognition of Palestine and move its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. That would make it the first country in the 27-member EU to take that step (though not the first country in Europe: Kosovo already has an embassy in Jerusalem).
Likewise, Israel will open an embassy in Ljubljana for the first time.
“That’s an important and welcome milestone — and something many of us have hoped to see for a long time,” Waltl explained in an email. “That said, I still feel it’s too early for me to draw broader conclusions about what this will mean in practice for bilateral relations, or for the Jewish community. I’d rather judge by actions than by first impressions.”
Ernest Herzog, executive director for operations at the World Jewish Congress, said Slovenia’s new direction is a lot more than a foreign policy adjustment; it carries huge historic significance.
“Israel was among the first countries to recognize Slovenia’s independence in 1991” following the breakup of Yugoslavia, he said. Opening an embassy in Jerusalem “would send a clear signal that Slovenia views Israel not only as a key regional partner but also as an important ally in defending the rules-based democratic order at a time of growing geopolitical instability.”
In Colombia, the shift is even more dramatic. Famous for world-class coffee, salsa dancing, beautiful beaches and biodiversity, it’s home to maybe 5,000 Jews out of 54 million inhabitants.
President Gustavo Petro — Colombia’s first left-wing leader in recent memory — is a former M-19 guerrilla leader. He became mayor of Bogotá in 2011 and president in 2022. On May 2, 2024, in the midst of worsening conditions in Gaza, Petro severed diplomatic relations with Israel and stopped lucrative exports of coal to Israel, as well as all weapons deals.
Margarita Manjarrez, Colombia’s first female ambassador to Israel, stayed on until June 30 of that year, at which point she closed the embassy in Tel Aviv (though consular services remain open).
Petro, constitutionally limited to one term, backed Iván Cepeda as his successor. But Cepeda lost to right-wing businessman Abelardo de la Espriella by the narrowest margin in Colombian election history.
Widely supported by Colombia’s small but wealthy Jewish community, the new president will be sworn in Aug. 7. One of his first acts, he said, will be to open an embassy in Jerusalem. That would make it the ninth embassy in Israel’s capital, along with those of the United States, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Fiji and Argentina.
Manjarrez, now Bogotá’s ambassador to Singapore, declined to comment. But Harry Toledo, the Israeli-based director of Fuente Latina — an NGO that provides pro-Israel Middle East coverage for Spanish-language media in the United States and Latin America — says he’s not surprised by any of this.
“I don’t think the issue was Israel,” said Toledo, who is originally from Medellín but has spent the last 24 years living in Tel Aviv. “As we’ve seen in recent years, all these governments are taking advantage of the situation here to distract from their problems at home. In Spain, we clearly saw that Sánchez is using the Palestinians to dispel criticism of his own government. Petro in Colombia did the same thing.”
Toledo, one of thousands of Colombians living in Israel, noted that the Trump administration revoked Petro’s U.S. visa last year, and then later added him, his wife, his son and his interior minister to its Specially Designated Nationals list due to their alleged illicit drug trafficking.
“Petro was a criminal and a genocidal guerrilla. He was a real antisemite who even posted ‘Heil Hitler’ online,” said Toledo. “It’s not like he was hiding his position against Jews.”
Michael Shifter, former president of the Inter-American Dialogue — a D.C. think tank — noted that 12 of Latin America’s last 15 elections have been won by right-wing candidates. Voters in only Brazil, Mexico and Uruguay elected leftists.
Shifter said it’s not so much an ideological conservative turn that’s fueling this wave — but more a profound desire for change.
“The recent electoral swings are better understood as a reflection of widespread frustration with governments of different political stripes that have failed to address persistent economic, security and governance challenges,” he said.
Shifter is no stranger to the region. In the early 1980s, when the Dialogue was founded, Latin America’s biggest economies — Argentina, Brazil and Mexico — were cash-strapped, debt-ridden and beholden to the IMF. And the United States under President Ronald Reagan was actively supporting the government of El Salvador in its bloody war against leftist insurgents, while at the same time secretly funding contras hoping to overthrow Marxist Sandinistas in neighboring Nicaragua.
The only country doing well at the time was energy-rich Venezuela — which today is considered a failed state.
Mike Skol, a former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela who has extensive business ties in Colombia, said de la Espriella’s election is certainly part of that Latin rightward shift against socialism.
The question, he poses, is whether he’ll behave more like Argentina’s Javier Milei, a libertarian who is an outspoken supporter of Israel, or El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele — a hugely popular president of Palestinian origin who has on more than one occasion called himself “the world’s coolest dictator.”
“The White House is looking for outspoken allies — on Venezuela, on Cuba, on Israel, and on oil,” Skol said in an email. “Expect Colombia to be unequivocal in all. The payoff will be an important pillar of regime success.”
Ultimately, the real prize for Israel would be a full restoration of ties with oil-rich Venezuela, which were broken by Hugo Chávez in 2009 following an Israel incursion into Gaza that year. After Trump’s ousting of former president Nicolás Maduro last year and his tacit support for Maduro’s successor, Delcy Rodríguez, anything appears possible.
Just last week, Rodríguez was photographed in a once-unthinkable meeting with uniformed IDF brass overseeing Israeli rescue efforts in the wake of two powerful earthquakes that have devastated Venezuela’s coastal region. The 30-member team’s efforts mark a rare diplomatic thaw following years of official Venezuelan hostility toward Israel.
This raises the inevitable question: Could the Israeli flag one day flutter from an embassy in Caracas?
“Yes, I think it is very possible that Venezuela under Delcy will restore relations with Israel,” Skol said, noting that the U.S. secretary of state is seen as running the show in Venezuela since Maduro’s ouster. “All Marco Rubio has to do is ask.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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