When the domes of Edirne’s abandoned Great Synagogue caved in, Rifat Mitrani, the town’s last Jew, knew it spelled the end of nearly two millennia of Jewish heritage in this Turkish town. As a boy, Mitrani studied Hebrew in the synagogue’s gardens and, in the 1970s, dispatched its Torah to Istanbul after the community shrank…
(Reuters) — Israel on Wednesday accused a senior Turkish official of “misusing” a Holocaust commemoration to criticize Israeli policy, the latest exchange in a bitter row between the former allies. Turkish Parliamentary Speaker Cemil Cicek late on Wednesday addressed members of Turkey’s tiny Jewish community and others at a Holocaust Memorial Day event and said…
(Reuters) — Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Thursday compared Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu to the Islamist militants who killed 17 people in Paris last week, saying both had committed crimes against humanity. Davutoglu said Israel’s bombardments of Gaza and its storming in 2010 of a Turkish-led aid convoy headed there, in which 10 Turks…
Israel’s foreign minister called Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan an “anti-Semitic bully” in a meeting with Israeli ambassadors on Wednesday and said Europe was being cowardly in not taking him on. In an address to Israeli envoys based in Europe and Asia, Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of far-right party Yisrael Beitenu, was withering about Erdogan, a…
Turkish Chief Rabbi Isak Haleva met with Pope Francis on the Catholic spiritual leader’s first official visit to Turkey. Francis, who was born in Argentina, and Haleva met privately for about 15 minutes on Sunday, Vatican Radio reported. The two conversed in Spanish, which is Haleva’s maternal language as a Sephardic Jew of Spanish descent….
Saul Cenudioglu remembers when his synagogue was full and when Muslims and Christians of this diverse Turkish city joined with Jews to celebrate marriages and births. “I’m afraid in 15 or 20 years, people in Antakya might be saying, ‘Did you know there used to be Jews in this city?’” Cenudioglu said. Antakya sits just…
Something absolutely astonishing is going on right now in northern Syria along the Turkish border: refugees streaming on foot across the barbed-wire frontier by the tens of thousands, fleeing the advance of the terrorist army known as the Islamic State. As many as 100,000 refugees, mostly Kurds, have crossed the border in the past week…
Jews in Turkey are under no obligation to comment on Israel’s operation in Gaza, a group of Jewish intellectuals in Turkey said. The open letter issued Friday was in response to calls for the Jewish community to denounce the operation, as well as a campaign claiming the Jews of Turkey are responsible for Israel’s actions…
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