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Orthodox pilgrimage to the grave of Kabbalah rabbi buried in Istanbul picks up after COVID slump
ISTANBUL (JTA) — Dozens of Orthodox Jews gathered on a hill overlooking the Bosphorus Strait.
Above them, guarding the hilltop, stood a Turkish military base, and below sat the swanky Istanbul neighborhood of Ortaköy. Dominating the view was the 15th of July Martyrs Bridge, which connects Europe and Asia. On the Asian side of the Strait loomed the massive Çamlica Mosque.
None of those sites were of interest to the crowd, however. The hill also contains one of Istanbul’s main Jewish cemeteries, and those gathered — who came from Turkey, the United States and Israel — were there to pay their respects on the yahrzeit, or death anniversary, of Rabbi Naphtali HaKohen Katz, an influential and prolific 17th-century rabbi who was devoted to Jewish mysticism.
Pilgrimages like this one, made by Orthodox groups of varying sizes to the grave sites of similarly revered Jewish figures across Europe, are far from uncommon and have spawned a cottage travel industry. Among the largest and most publicized is the annual pilgrimage to Uman, Ukraine, which brings tens of thousands to the grave of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov each Rosh Hashanah (not on the anniversary of his death). Another involves the grave of Rabbi Elimelech Weisbaum, an early Hasidic leader, in Lizhensk, Poland, in the early spring.
(David I. Klein)
Yitzhak Friedman, a Hasidic Jew from Lakewood, New Jersey, who is currently studying in Israel, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he and a few friends used the opportunity of Katz’s yahrzeit to rationalize a short trip to Istanbul.
“It was cheap tickets, we heard a lot of great things, so I had a nice jump over for two days,” he said.
Another group of Orthodox women from Israel said they had planned their trip similarly to coincide with the “hilulah” — using the Hebrew word for such a pilgrimage.
Though the pilgrimage to Uman has become a rowdy days-long affair, during which the influx of Orthodox Jews rent out most of the small city’s available apartments and hotel rooms, other pilgrimages, such as the one to Katz’s grave, have a more quiet and introspective atmosphere. The crowd on Tuesday took breaks from praying to eat at the cemetery’s synagogue, passing around whiskey and snacks.
Friedman said that he has made several similar journeys in the past year alone, including to Dynow, Poland, to the grave of Reb Tzvi Elimelech, another early Hasidic leader. He also spent more than 30 hours traveling to war-torn Ukraine to spend Rosh Hashanah in Uman, a practice that was strongly discouraged by both Israeli and Ukrainian rabbinic leaders this year.
The Jewish cemetery where Katz is buried offers a hilltop view of the city. (David I. Klein)
Friedman said he had heard that a visit to Katz’s grave had helped people with various things, from finding “the right match” to having kids have kids to being cured from a sickness. He asked simply for “happiness” in his prayers.
He also attributed some of the effects of the grave to the fact that it is visited less than the one in Uman.
“It’s known that a tzaddik that very few people come to, his powers are much bigger,” Friedman said.
Another of the pilgrims, a Hasidic man from the Doroger sect in Bnei Brak, Israel, explained that he was a distant descendent of Katz, and that, though he was coming for the first time, he came to accompany his father who had been making the trip for 50 years.
Katz was born in 1649, in what is today Ostrovo, Ukraine, and at the age of 14 he was captured and sold into slavery by Tatars, a Turkic muslim group in Crimea and other parts of Southern Ukraine. But he escaped years later and returned to Ostrovo to become the community’s rabbi, later transferring to Posen in modern-day Poland, where he became a scholar of Kabbalistic literature.
But his struggles would not end with the Tatars. Later in life, Katz was called to Frankfurt, in today’s Germany, to serve the community there. When a fire broke out in the city in 1711, he was accused of using kabbalistic charms to stop it from being extinguished by natural means and imprisoned by the local leadership.
Upon his release, he fled to Prague — where he quarreled with another Kabbalah teacher devoted to Shabbetai Zevi, a false messiah — and later Wroclaw.
In past years, as many as 300 people at a time have visited the Istanbul cemetery. (David I. Klein)
After a life filled with struggle in Europe, Katz tried to emigrate to the holy land but only made it as far as Constantinople, where he died in 1718, and was buried by the local Jewish community in the Ortaköy Cemetery.
Ever since, the grave has been a site of pilgrimage, explained Rabbi Mendy Chitrik, an Istanbul rabbi affiliated with the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement — and another distant descendent of Katz’s — who helped in the restoration of the grave in 2005.
“Throughout the ages some great rabbis have allegedly made the pilgrimage,” Chitrik said, including the Baal Shem Tov — the founder of the Hasidic Judaism — Rabbi Nachman of Breslov and others.
“I have accompanied great rabbis who came anonymously to pray at his grave,” Chitrik added. “Some fly in for a day on private jets and leave.”
While some people come throughout the year, the most popular time to come is Katz’s yahrzeit, the 24th of Tevet on the Hebrew calendar. In past years, as many as 300 people came for the occasion, said Albert Elvaşvili, the president of the Ortaköy Jewish community which manages the cemetery.
However, he noted that attendance often rises and falls with the changes in Israeli-Turkish relations, much like general Israeli tourism to Turkey, which reached an all time high this year.
The biggest slump came during the COVID-19 pandemic, with only a handful of pilgrims coming the last two years. Now it seems that the tradition is once more back in force, with several buses of pilgrims from different countries and sects coming throughout the day.
“As relations with Israel and the Jewish people are coming to a better place, I believe there will be many more people coming in, and as Turkey becomes much more attractive for the Jewish and religious traveler, there will be many more opportunities for people to come,” Chitrik said. “Not just to the kever [grave] of Naphtali Katz on the 24th of Tevet, but to Rabbi Chaim Palachi in Izmir, on the 19th of Shevat, next month, and Rabbi Yehudah Rozanes, on the 26th of Nisan, and many other rabbis who are buried here in the important cemeteries of Turkey.”
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Muslim and Sephardic Jewish college students are connecting over shared heritage
Joseph Pool, a senior at Rollins College in Florida, grew up hearing his Moroccan-born grandparents describe Mimouna, a traditional Moroccan Jewish celebration marking the return to eating chametz after Passover. Because Jewish families had cleared their homes of chametz for the holiday, Muslim neighbors would bring over fresh flour, butter, and milk, and together they would enjoy a chametz-filled meal.
Amid rising campus tensions after October 7, Pool decided to host a Mimouna event of his own at Rollins College, and Muslim students showed up in droves.
“I spent years sleeping over at my grandparents’ house and hearing stories about the connection Muslims and Jews shared in Morocco,” Pool said. Seeing Muslim classmates embrace the celebration, he recalled thinking: “Wow, this is still the case today. There is still this connection ability here.”
At a moment when Jewish-Muslim tensions have intensified on campuses nationwide, some Sephardic and Muslim students say shared cultural heritage, rather than formal interfaith programming, is opening unexpected space for connection.
SAMi (Sephardic American Mizrahi Initiative) hosts Sephardic cultural programming on 16 college campuses across the country, including Persian music karaoke nights, hamsa painting events, and Mimouna celebrations. According to Manashe Khaimov, SAMi’s founder and CEO, roughly 10% of the 6,000 students the organization has engaged are Muslim.
The events are not intended to be spaces for interfaith dialogue, and that is a big part of their appeal. “Students don’t want to show up to an interfaith event unless [they’re] interested in political dialogue,” said Khaimov. Rather, students who are just looking for a place to engage with their culture show up to listen to the kind of music they grew up with, eat familiar foods, and hear Arabic or Farsi spoken.
For many Muslim students, SAMi events “smell the way it smells at home” as opposed to many Jewish spaces on college campuses that can feel “foreign” or “alienating,” said Khaimov. “For most of the Muslim students,” he said, “this is the first time even walking into Hillel spaces.”
Emily Nisimov, a Bukharian student from Queens College who organized Sephardic heritage events on her campus with SAMi, said, “The point of the events originally was to spread love and intimacy between Jewish students.” To her surprise, Muslim students started showing up. “Maybe they did just come for the food,” she said, “but the fact is that they stayed and they interacted with us and they tried to find a middle ground, which I was really impressed and shocked by.”
These connections are not limited to organized programming. Across campuses, Muslim students say friendships with Sephardic and Mizrahi peers have reshaped their understanding of Judaism, and Jewish students say the friendships have changed them, too.
Ali Mohsin Bozdar, a Muslim student at Springfield College who met Sephardic students through Interfaith America’s BRAID fellowship, said, “Jewish people from Middle Eastern backgrounds — most of the culture is similar. The food, the music, the language. I found that really fascinating,” he said. “It automatically binds you.”
Yishmael Columna, a Moroccan Jewish student and SAMi organizer at Florida International University, said the exchange has been mutual. “After Oct. 7”, he said, “it’s easy to give in to hate.” But getting to know Muslim peers complicated that instinct. “I wouldn’t be able to form opinions on many things as well as I do now if I didn’t have these conversations with them,” he said.
Sofia Houir, a Moroccan Muslim senior at Columbia University, said she had never met a Jewish person before attending college. Forming close friendships with Sephardic students on Columbia’s campus changed that. “Having friends who are Middle Eastern Jews definitely made Judaism more personal to me,” she said. “You can read about Judaism, you can study it, but talking to friends about how they grew up made me realize that, regardless of our religion, we’re all North African or Middle Eastern.”
Sofia formed a particularly close bond with an Iraqi Israeli student, Orpaz Zamir, during her time at Columbia, which she says deeply influenced her decision to travel to Israel for the first time. “Orpaz played a huge role in me going to Israel, just because I’m super close to him. And I really, really wanted to discover his culture, and to discover his country,” she said.
But that decision came with consequences.
Sofia said that her friendships with Jewish and Israeli students as well as her decision to travel to Israel caused peers in the Muslim and Arab communities on campus to stop speaking to her.
“I had some heated arguments with people who basically argued with me as if I was representing the Israeli government,” she said. “The frustrating thing was that they never had a conversation with me about it. They just presumed that me going was me validating Netanyahu’s politics or betraying the Palestinians.”
Nisimov said campus tensions at Queens College, part of New York City’s public university system, have not disappeared simply because of a heightened awareness of shared culture.
After October 7, she said, “A lot of claims were made that we should go back to where we came from.” “We tried to explain to them — just like you, we came from the same spot — but they didn’t want to listen.”
Even so, she said, her personal friendships have endured outside the realm of discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “My Muslim friend and I, we’re not really on the political level of conversation,” she said. “But we have plenty of conversations about our cultures and our religions and the differences and similarities.”
Rethinking Jewish Whiteness
For some students, these relationships have also challenged assumptions about Jewish identity and, thus, the tenor of political conversations.
Mian Muhammad Abdul Hamid, a Muslim student from Syracuse University, told the Forward that he “thinks the majority” of Muslim students on his college campus believe Jews only come from Europe. “When people think Jewish, the first thing that pops up is European.”
Bozdar agreed. “When I met these people, it confirmed for me that there are Jews from the Middle East,” he said. “Until you meet people, nothing is for sure.”
Columna recalled participating in a tabling event about Israel shortly after Oct. 7, when a Muslim student approached him to talk. The two later became friends. Weeks later, Columna asked why he had approached him rather than the other nearby Jewish students.
“He told me, ‘I decided to talk to you because, in contrast to the Ashkenazi Jews nearby, you were the only one who looked brown,” Columna said.
“I feel that sometimes the reason why these conversations do not work is because Muslim students don’t feel that Jews are even part of the Middle East,” said Columna. “Once you break that wall, and you find a common ground,” he said, “it becomes a more productive conversation.”
Zamir, an Iraqi Jewish student at Columbia University, described a similar experience. Though initially nervous about enrolling amid campus tensions, he said, “I never felt I was being attacked for my views.”
A Muslim friend later told him it was because he was seen as “from the region.”
“If you are Mizrahi,” Zamir said, “Muslim students respect what you say a bit more because if you’re from the region, you’re entitled to be there.”
But that dynamic also raises uncomfortable questions about which Jewish students are seen as having legitimate perspectives on campus.
“There’s this extreme position that Ashkenazi Jews shouldn’t be there or shouldn’t have this view because they’re ‘colonizers,’ but you’re okay because you’re part of the region,” he said.
“Unfortunately, this is the case, but it also makes my interactions with them easier,” he added.
While several students said their conversations about their shared background remain at the cultural level rather than getting political, Pool believes shared meals can create space for conversations that lean on these shared identities.
“If you share a meal with someone, you start with something in common,” he said. “You have the same food, maybe then you have the same family tradition of how to cook this food. And then suddenly, when you’re talking about politics, you can talk about just a political issue versus it being your entire identity.”
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The one Jewish value everyone should hold dear in the age of AI
As friends, relatives and even colleagues dive headlong into our AI future, I’ve been stuck nervously on the platform’s edge. I’m not a skeptic of technology by nature, but by experience. I’ve watched too many shiny new toys come along, promising to make society smarter or better connected, only to become superspreaders of confusion, alienation and disenfranchisement.
So when you tell me a machine can summarize any book, draw any picture or write any email, my first thought is going to be, What could possibly go wrong?
This, too, was the reaction of the Haredi rabbis who declared a communal fast over AI last month.
“If at the push of a button, I can get a hold of a d’var torah for my Shabbos meal from AI, to us, that’s a problem,” a Haredi leader told me at the time. “No, no — I want you to open the book and read it and come up with a question and come up with an answer. That’s part of what’s holy about learning Torah. It’s not just end result. It’s the process.”
Curious about their logic, I spent some time tracking down Lakewood’s gedolim to learn more. This was no straightforward task — I found it easier to get a hold of their wives than the great rabbis themselves. Even at dinner hour, these titans of Torah study were still in the beit midrash. But eventually I got through to three — thanks to my cousin Jeffrey, who knew a rav who knew a rav — and that was fortunate, because I came away with the Jewish skeleton key to our brave new world.
That key is the Jewish value of עֲמֵילוּת (ameilut), or toil. As far as Jewish values go, ameilut is an obscure one. It lacks the celebrity swagger of its better-known peers like chesed and tzedakah or the political power of tikkun olam. It was never associated with a biblical matriarch or carved into a golem’s forehead. Yet I believe it is just as crucial. Yes, toiling is a mitzvah. And in the age of AI, ameilut can be a human road map.
The word’s root appears a couple dozen times in the Hebrew Bible — unsurprisingly, it’s a recurring theme in Job — but its salience comes not from the Torah but from commentary on Leviticus 26:3, which establishes ameilut as a sacred endeavor. When God implores Israel to “walk with” the commandments, Rashi, an 11th century rabbi whose commentaries are considered authoritative, reinterpreted this to mean that God wants Jews to be ameilim b’torah — toiling in Torah study. He is reinterpreting God’s command that we walk and move forward to also mean that we should take time to stand still, turn over (and over) the same words to find new meaning and view getting stuck as a sign of progress.
For Haredim — who pronounce it ameilus — the notion that struggle can be its own reward underpins a life spent poring over sefarim in the beit midrash (and missing phone calls from the Jewish press). It follows that ChatGPT, which transforms knowledge from something developed to something consumed, is anathema to their approach. They’ve realized that making learning easy has actually made learning hard.
To be sure, the goals of the Haredi world are not exactly the same as mine. Those communities are famously insular, wary of the internet and especially cognizant of secular society’s pernicious influence. I’m basically the opposite: I love to mix it up (including with Haredi Jews) and am extremely online. A little narishkeit is good for the soul, as far as I can tell.
But I’ve found that ameilut-maxxing translates pretty well to non-religious life, too. It’s an imperative to embrace the challenge. As a notoriously limited chef, I’m now toiling in cookbooks; as a writer, I can cherish the blank page. Reframing the hard part as the good part, then, is a reminder that the toil is actually our divine right. Because ameilut is something AI can’t experience, replicate or understand. It is the very essence of what it means to be alive.
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Mistrial Declared in Case of Students Charged After Stanford Anti-Israel Protests
FILE PHOTO: A student attends an event at a protest encampment in support of Palestinians at Stanford University during the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Stanford, California U.S., April 26, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo
A judge declared a mistrial on Friday in a case of five current and former Stanford University students related to the 2024 pro-Palestinian protests when demonstrators barricaded themselves inside the school president’s office.
Twelve protesters were initially charged last year with felony vandalism, according to prosecutors who said at least one suspect entered the building by breaking a window. Police arrested 13 people on June 5, 2024, in relation to the incident and the university said the building underwent “extensive” damage.
The case was tried in Santa Clara County Superior Court against five defendants charged with felony vandalism and felony conspiracy to trespass. The rest previously accepted plea deals or diversion programs.
The jury was deadlocked. It voted nine to three to convict on the felony charge of vandalism and eight to four to convict on the felony charge to trespass. Jurors failed to reach a verdict after deliberations.
The charges were among the most serious against participants in the 2024 pro-Palestinian protest movement on US colleges in which demonstrators demanded an end to Israel’s war in Gaza and Washington’s support for its ally along with a divestment of funds by their universities from companies supporting Israel.
Prosecutors in the case said the defendants engaged in unlawful property destruction.
“This case is about a group of people who destroyed someone else’s property and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. That is against the law,” Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement, adding he sought a new trial.
Anthony Brass, a lawyer for one of the protesters, told the New York Times his side was not defending lawlessness but “the concept of transparency and ethical investment.”
“This is a win for these young people of conscience and a win for free speech,” Brass said, adding “humanitarian activism has no place in a criminal courtroom.”
Protesters had renamed the building “Dr. Adnan’s Office” after Adnan Al-Bursh, a Palestinian doctor who died in an Israeli prison after months of detention.
Over 3,000 were arrested during the 2024 US pro-Palestinian protest movement, according to media tallies. Some students faced suspension, expulsion and degree revocation.