Baki Ozmen, a self-described historian of the Jews of the remote Turkish city of Sanliurfa, pulled down the neck of his brown turtleneck sweater with one hand and made karate-like chops at his tan-colored flesh with the other.
“The Jews used sharp metal objects to cut the neck of their brethren. Only the Jews kill that way,” he told JTA. “They were the city’s best smiths; that’s how we know it was the Jews who killed that Jewish family in 1945. This is what our elders tell us.”
To create a pretext that would enable them to immigrate to Palestine, the Jews of Sanliurfa, an ancient city known in the Bible as Ur, hatched a plan to hack to death a local Jewish family and then blame it on their Muslim neighbors. Or so goes local lore.
Since then, said Ozmen, a bear-like man with a jowly, bearded face, there have been no Jews in the stalls that once belonged to Jewish artisans pounding out copper pots or finjans deep in the city’s labyrinthine bazaar — or anywhere else in the city, for that matter.
But Ozmen’s information isn’t quite accurate: About 10 Jewish families still live in Sanliurfa, clandestinely celebrating certain Jewish holidays in the privacy of their homes.
To stay alive, the Jews of Sanliurfa — the ancient town where Abraham stopped to water his camel train, according to the Bible — conceal their yarmulkes and Jewish books in hidden corners of their homes, according to several sources, including Kadir Celikcan, the director of Sanliurfa TV.
Like their neighbors, they dutifully head to the city’s ancient mosques to pray, finger worry beads, and wear the traditional baggy pants and red-checkered Kaffiyeh of the Kurds — yet they remain Jews.
More up-beat, Nicole Argo, in the Jerusalem Post, has a thoughtful column on how Turkish Jews get long with their Islamic government these days.
And more off-beat, JTA also looks at Turkey's Hesed L’Avraham synagogue, which is located on the island of Buyukada, part of a small chain of islands an hour’s ferry ride from Istanbul, where all cars are banned.
(Now, if someone wants to take a horse carriage — the fastest mode of transportation on the island — to synagogue, that’s a different matter.)
Called the Princes’ Islands, the isles have, over the last several decades, become an important and unique feature of Istanbul Jewish life — essentially the summer home of a large part of the city’s Jewish community. Many Turkish Jewish families stay on the islands all summer long, with husbands commuting to work on the ferries that ply the waters between the islands and the city.
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