David I. Klein | JTA.org
IZMIR, Turkey — Since the fall of
the Iron Curtain, Prague has been a
popular tourist destination for both
Jewish travelers and others interested
in Jewish history.

The Nazis left many of the city’s
synagogues and Jewish sites relatively
intact, intending to showcase them as
remnants of an extinct culture — and
that allows the Czech capital to provide
an uncommon look into the pre-war
infrastructure of Ashkenazi Europe.

Could Izmir, Turkey’s third-largest city,
become a Sephardic counterpart, 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
In Turkey, a Festival
Revives a Jewel of the
Sephardic World and Aims
to Break Stereotypes
second century A.D. Like elsewhere
in the Ottoman Empire, though, its
community grew exponentially with the
infl ux 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, 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,” said
Bencoya. “We can’t recreate that, but
we cannot forget that either.”
Restorations of the Etz Hayyim Synagogue revealed a Hebrew inscription next
to the Torah ark that reads “Makom Hashushvinin,” meaning “place of the
groomsman.” Whether the specifi c area was used for weddings is unclear.

18 JANUARY 12, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
Synagogues have been home
to major events
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 culture and history of Izmir’s Jewish
community. During nine days in the month of
December that included the week of
Chanukah, 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 Chanukah 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 fi rst 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,
meaning “group” or “congregation”)
represent a piece of cultural heritage.

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 more than
150 acres where almost anything can
be bought and sold. On Havra Sokak,
the merchants hock fresh fruits and,
hopefully, fresher fi sh. One street to the
south can be found all manner of leather
goods; one to the north has markets for
gold, silver and other precious metals;
one to the west has coff ee 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 distinct 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,”
explained Bencoya.

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.

These days, 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.

TOP: Izmir is located on Turkey’s Aegean coast.

Photo by David I. Klein
feature