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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 post In Turkey, a festival revives a jewel of the Sephardic world and aims to break stereotypes appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Why Dolly Parton sang a song about a Jewish journalist
A Broadway show, a star-studded television tribute, a new hotel and museum in Nashville. As odes to Dolly Parton keep coming, a recording of the late country music singer honoring an American Jewish journalist has recently surfaced.
Never before released in America, the song, “A Bridge Across,” sung by Parton and accompanied by the Nashville Symphony, honors slain journalist Daniel Pearl.
The song features spare lyrics set to violin music composed in honor of Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was brutally murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002.
Originally recorded in 2008 by Parton, renowned fiddler Mark O’Connor, and the Nashville Symphony, the song was intended to be part of a compilation album called This is My America, produced and funded, oddly enough, in Canada but never released in the U.S.
It was O’Connor and his wife Maggie who resurrected the recording this fall, shortly after the deaths of Parton and another musician that connected the four artists: Oregon violinmaker Jonathan Cooper, who died in September.
Deeply troubled by the journalist’s murder in 2002, Cooper learned Pearl was an amateur fiddler and set out to create a quartet of string instruments – two violins, a viola and a cello – in the journalist’s honor. He entrusted the instruments to O’Connor to use during his annual summer music camp in North Carolina. Every year since, four students from the camp have received one of the Daniel Pearl memorial instruments to play for a year.
“These young people carry the message that love fights hatred through music-making and understanding that Daniel Pearl’s family want him remembered for,” O’Connor told The New York Times. Likewise, Cooper’s loving gesture inspired Parton, O’Connor said.
Canadian violinist Samantha Robichaud received one of the violins in 2005 and has gone on to become a successful recording artist with more than a half dozen albums. She has toured North America as an ambassador for the Daniel Pearl Foundation, sharing Pearl’s story, including his passion for
music and its power to change lives. Enter songwriters Tom McBryde and Lynn Wilbanks, whose introduction to Robichaud inspired verse.
On the album, the Nashville Symphony played one of Robichaud’s compositions while Parton introduced Pearl to listeners.
“He believed that music was something that could cross all social barriers, political borders and imaginary boundaries,” Parton says, before singing McBride’s and Wilbanks’ lyrics.
“A bridge across a question one journey begins, one step at a time to a place within.
A bridge across a border, a hand reaching out one heart at a time to erase the doubt.
A bridge across a difference can close a divide, one song to be sung on the other side.”
“It was perfect. She knows what he stood for,” Pearl’s father, Dr. Judea Pearl, told the Forward. “She was such a giving person.”
Judea Pearl met Parton in 2018 at the Los Angeles Press Club where she received that year’s Public Service Award for Contributions to Civic Life for her Imagination Library, which sends free books to children. (It inspired the creation of the PJ Library for Jewish books.) The Press Club recently dedicated its upcoming National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards to Parton’s memory.
In 2018, Judea Pearl was there to present the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism to Saudi Arabian writer and blogger Raif Badawi whose wife accepted the award while he served a 10-year prison sentence for his online activism.
The foundation devoted to Daniel Pearl’s legacy has been less visible since the 2021 death of Pearl’s mother Ruth who, as a young girl, witnessed and survived the anti-Jewish pogroms in Baghdad known as the Farhud.
As the 25th anniversary of his son’s murder approaches in February, Judea Pearl said the foundation will start a new chapter under his daughters’ leadership. Parton’s song lends the effort a touching soundtrack.
The post Why Dolly Parton sang a song about a Jewish journalist appeared first on The Forward.
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Mamdani marks first Oct. 7 anniversary as mayor with statement blasting Israel’s war in Gaza as genocide
On the third anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel — his first commemoration as New York City’s mayor — Zohran Mamdani mourned the Israeli victims and the 251 people taken hostage before devoting most of a statement to condemning Israel’s war in Gaza as a “genocide” and accusing the U.S. government of complicity in Israeli war crimes.
“The suffering did not begin nor end that day,” Mamdani said in a 200-word statement, noting the Palestinian casualties of the war that was launched as a military campaign against Hamas. “Three years later, we must refuse to accept a world in which occupation and apartheid continue, where war crimes are met with impunity, and our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.”
The mayor’s words were in stark contrast to statements released by other elected officials, including New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who noted it was the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
“The pain of that dark day has not faded,” she wrote. “But neither has the strength, resilience and enduring hope of the Jewish people.”
House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries also noted the attack was carried out by “Hamas terrorists intent on destroying Israel,” but also acknowledged Palestinian deaths and Gaza destruction.
New York Attorney General Letitia James also released a statement, to “honor the innocent people murdered and families forever changed by the Hamas terrorist attacks,” a term some noted Mamdani did not use.
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, noted another term Mamdani did not include.
“Not once do you say ‘Jews,’ Greenblatt wrote on X.
“You are weaponizing a day meant for mourning the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust to recycle your usual antizionist talking points,” he added. “The city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel deserves a mayor who can honor the dead without exploiting them.”
Democratic congressional nominee Brad Lander, an outspoken Jewish ally of the mayor, did not criticize the mayor’s statement. Instead, on his Substack, he shared his reflections on the anniversary, calling for Israelis, Palestinians, Jews and Muslims to mourn together as a first step toward peace.
“We can mourn for those lost on October 7th and still acknowledge the enormous imbalance of power between Israel and the Palestinians,” he wrote. “Over the past three years, so much more death, destruction, and displacement has fallen on Palestinians.”
But David Greenfield, a former Councilmember and head of the Met Council charity group, called Mamdani’s statement unhelpful, one that risks “further dividing” New Yorkers. “I really wish the Mayor of NYC would just focus on NYC,” he wrote on X.
Alex Vindman, a former Democratic Senate candidate in Florida, also criticized the statement, posting on X that it “did a real disservice” to Democrats and democratic socialist candidates who are making their appeals to moderates and independents in battleground states.
Former Republican congressman turned-Trump critic Joe Walsh posted on X: “Shame on you @NYCMayor. You can’t just give one day for Israel to mourn? One day? The deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, and you can’t remember only that atrocity today? You must throw in everything else today?”
A pro-Palestinian activist since his college years, Mamdani has been unapologetic about his anti-Zionist views that continue to shape his tenure. His harsh rhetoric on Israel and handling of antisemitism — including refusal to define that term — and defense of pro-Palestinian protests outside synagogues have strained relations with parts of the Jewish community.
Mamdani drew fierce backlash earlier this year when he produced a Nakba Day video commemorating the displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s founding in 1948 around Israel’s independence day.
A new poll published Wednesday morning found that 64% of Jewish voters in the city prefer that Mamdani skip any event marking the Oct. 7 massacre. As a Democratic nominee last year, Mamdani attended an Oct. 7 commemoration marking the loss of Israeli and Palestinian lives. That event is not on the mayor’s daily public schedule, but a meeting with a group of local Palestinian Americans is on the calendar.
Still, he has failed to satisfy some of his supporters, including young activists who backed his bid for mayor and attended the pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses after the Oct. 7 attacks. Multiple chapters of the Young Democratic Socialists of America are planning to demonstrate outside city hall tonight on the premise that Mamdani failed the Palestinian movement, capitulating, they say, “to Zionist pressure.”
The mayor declined to comment on this demonstration.
The post Mamdani marks first Oct. 7 anniversary as mayor with statement blasting Israel’s war in Gaza as genocide appeared first on The Forward.
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Chicago Jewish theater drops Naomi Ragen play, saying actors feared repercussions of working with the Israeli writer
(JTA) — Naomi Ragen, the New York-born Israeli novelist and playwright known for her portrayals of Orthodox Jewish women in crisis, says the cancellation of a planned Chicago revival of one of her plays represents a “return to McCarthyism” in the American cultural scene.
Ragen, 77, has revealed that plans by a Jewish arts company in Chicago to revive her 2001 play “Women’s Minyan” have been shelved. In a post shared with her thousands of followers on Facebook, Ragen included an email from the company’s artistic director saying that she had been inundated by messages from actors, directors and designers who feared that working with a “a pro-Zionist Jew/Israeli” like Ragen could damage their careers.
Ragen told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Chicago-based Arts Judaica first approached her in July with a request to stage her play about a haredi woman trying to flee her abusive marriage. Elayne LeTraunik, the company’s artistic director, told Ragen they intended to stage 13 performances next March.
Happy to collaborate, Ragen asked for a contract. She heard nothing until this week when she received a reply from LeTraunik, saying she “must sadly withdraw my intent to do the show.”
LeTraunik’s email continued: “People were seeing you were a pro Zionist Jew/Israeli and I was bombarded with actors, directors and designers who were actually afraid that doing a show with you as playwright would hurt their careers. I never have faced this before and I was stunned about all the accusations of ‘genocide’ flying around.”
The episode stands in contrast to Arts Judaica’s stated mission: Its website says that “American audiences need Jewish stories on stage more than ever.”
“In the past I have done plays about suicide bombers and never had a peep from anyone,” LeTraunik told Ragen. “This world is getting insane. Perhaps once all this dies down (if it ever does) I will try again. I am so sorry.”
Born in New York, Ragen emigrated to Israel in 1971, where she settled in Jerusalem. In addition to best-selling novels like “Sotah” and “The Sacrifice of Tamar,” she regularly writes opinion pieces sharing her hawkish views on Israel. On her website and on social media, she shares dispatches from her “Israel War Diary,” expressing strong support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and IDF military action against Hamas. She has also spoken against what she describes as a worldwide “climate of hatred, fear, and intimidation.”
Some people, she said, have suggested the play was canceled because she is a right-wing Zionist. “Are we now back to McCarthyism, where you have to check the political credentials of an artist [before deciding] whether or not to promote their work?” she said.
“I thought all the progressives were against McCarthyism. Now we’re back there where I have to pass some kind of political test in order to have my work shown.”
LeTraunik told JTA she could never have predicted the pushback or the cancellation when she first approached Ragen. “This situation is one I have never faced before after a lifetime in theater,” she said.
“Since the play has nothing to do with politics I didn’t anticipate any problems,” she continued. “But unfortunately people had done research on Naomi and felt so triggered by her politics it appeared that there were concerns from would-be actors, etc. and even the person who had offered to put up some of the funding was not comfortable.
“As for me, I am almost 80 years old, [a] lifetime American and Jew and I have long decided not to get involved in the current political turmoil. I just want to do interesting theater.”
Ragen told JTA that while it is “strange to get such a response from a Jewish venue,” particularly one whose mission statement includes Holocaust education, she is not angry at LeTraunik.
“I have only sympathy for her,” she said. “I think all these Jewish cultural organizations are now under fire and what we need is not to criticize them because they’re not brave enough, but to understand the pressures they’re under.”
Earlier this month the Anti-Defamation League published a report alleging “the systemic exclusion and marginalization of Jewish and Israeli artists across American cultural life.” In its examination of museums, publishing and live entertainment, the ADL said it found that Jewish, Israeli and Zionist artists have “faced growing scrutiny, organized protest activity, online targeting, event disruptions, reputational campaigns and, in some cases, cancellations or institutional distancing.”
Ragen said her play, originally commissioned by Habima, Israel’s national theater, has previously been staged in the United States. She is not taking the cancellation personally, she said, but as a symptom of a far greater problem.
“You had a situation in Germany in 1938 where you couldn’t produce a Jewish play or any play which didn’t toe the Nazi line,” she said. “Are we going back to that?”
In her conversation with JTA, Ragen called on “American Jews and good people” to “be a little brave,” adding: “It’s not time to build another Holocaust museum — it’s time to wake up, smell the coffee, and put your money and your time and your effort where your mouth is.
“If you are a person who wants to promote Holocaust education, well, you’re living in the middle of it.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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