Nesim Bencoya speaks from
his offi ce next to the restored
Sinyora Synagogue in Izmir.

Photo by David I. Klein
‘It’s good to remember these
people and their roots’
Hosting the festival within Izmir’s
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,” noted Bencoya.

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.

“This festival is not for Jewish people
to know us, but for non-Jews,” said
Bencoya. 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, said 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,” he 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 diff erent
cultures and a lot of diff erent 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 that
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. Many have
accused the project of being a tool
for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’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,” said
Bencoya. 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 codifi ed in the
Turkish Jewish community’s collective
The Sephardic cultural festival included concerts of Jewish and Ladino
music, traditional food tastings and lectures on Izmir’s Jewish community.

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,” said
Bencoya. 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,” said
Bencoya. “To Yahudi, there are a lot of
negative superlatives — dirty Yahudi,
fi lthy Yahudi, and this and that. So I insist
on saying that I am Yahudi because
people have a lot of pre-judgments
about the name Yahudi. So if you have
prejudgments about me, let’s open
them and talk about them.”
He added that “I am not so romantic
that I can eliminate all antisemitism,
but if I can eliminate some of the
prejudgments, then I can live a little
more at peace.”
So far, he feels that the festival is a
successful fi rst step.

“The non-Jewish community of Izmir
is fascinated,” said Bencoya. “If you
look on Facebook and Instagram, they
are talking about it ... they are fi ghting
over tickets, which sell out almost
immediately.” Now, he is only wondering how next
year he will be able to fi t more people
into the small and aged synagogues.

“For Turkey,” he explained, the festival
is very important because the country
can only remain among the enlightened
nations of the world “by being aware
of the diff erences between groups of
people, such as Jews, Christians, others
and Muslims.” ■
The Bikur Holim Synagogue is one of the few still functioning in Izmir.

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