The Synagogue Road, a slender pathway with a mishmash of colours and smells from fishmongers and spice-sellers, lies on the coronary heart of Izmir, Turkey’s third largest metropolis. The road begins at a stone’s throw from the Hellenistic-era agora and snakes by way of the historic industrial middle. It derives its identify from the 9 synagogues in its neighborhood, 4 of which have been in ruins till half a decade in the past.
“Not like the tucked-away ghettos of the Jews in lots of Europe, the Synagogue Road — or higher, the Synagogue District — is true on the coronary heart of city,” Nesim Bencoya, the coordinator of the Izmir Jewish Heritage Project, instructed Al-Monitor. “It’s a compact neighborhood with its synagogues, cortejos [houses where families lived together], a rabbinate and quite a few retailers and companies on the crisscrossing streets of Kemeralti, the industrial middle. Additionally it is an space the place synagogues stand facet by facet with mosques, the place businessmen from the Muslim, Jewish and Orthodox neighborhood have interaction in commerce and songs in Turkish, Greek and Ladino are sung one after the opposite from the close by taverns.”
For the final 12 years, Bencoya has been going door to door to drum up help for his plans to revive the world and construct a Jewish heritage middle that might attract locals and vacationers.
“Our neighborhood is now lower than 1,000,” Tilda Koenka, a tour information and mission assistant within the mission, instructed Al-Monitor. “However the Jewish heritage in Izmir is of world curiosity — it exhibits the function Jews performed within the metropolis.”
At its zenith within the mid-Nineteenth century, the 50,000-strong Jewish inhabitants made up the second largest neighborhood after the Greeks within the metropolis recognized within the Ottoman Empire as “Izmir, the infidel.” The town had 34 synagogues, a complicated hospital, native Torah faculties and a fancy school providing a curriculum in French. The town’s first printing press was a Jewish one, printing books in Hebrew, Ladino and finally in English, and boyoz, the Jewish pastry whose identify “bollos” means “little bread” in Ladino, grew to become one of many metropolis’s staple meals.
Many Jews selected to to migrate to France, the USA and Latin America because the weakening Ottoman Empire was ravaged by wars. Extra left when Israel was based in 1948 to start out a brand new life within the nascent state, significantly after Ankara levied hefty taxes often called the Wealth Tax on them in the course of the World Warfare II. Fearing exile or dying if unable to pay, members of the Jewish neighborhood shortly liquidated their belongings and wealth modified arms from non-Muslims to Muslims. The Ladino language fell quiet on the streets and the disused synagogues fell aside.
“The restoration work is gigantic,” Bencoya instructed a bunch of journalists as he stood on the slender hall that linked the Hevra and Foresteros synagogues. “Solely a yr in the past, the rubble was one meter excessive right here.”
As we speak, due to help from German Consulate of Izmir and the Israel-based Mordechai Kiriaty Basis, the frilly picket carvings on the ceiling of Ets Hayim Synagogue, the luxurious ground mosaics of Hevra and the corridors of the Foresteros that tie a number of synagogues to one another have reemerged.
“This uncommon cluster of synagogues bear a typical medieval Spanish architectural model,” Bencoya stated, explaining that the Sephardic Jews, expelled from Spain and Portugal by the 1492 Alhambra Decree, carried their aesthetic to the Ottoman Empire. However the Jewish presence within the area precedes the Spanish edict by centuries, as demonstrated by the late-Roman period synagogue in Sardis, 60 miles (97 kilometers) from the Izmir metropolis middle.
For Nikolaus Meyer-Landrut, the top of the European Union’s delegation to Turkey, the revival of Jewish heritage goes past structure. The EU has provided roughly half one million euros ($688,000) for a three-year mission to maintain Jewish heritage in Izmir. The mission will finance the institution of the İzmir Jewish Cultural Heritage Platform, workshops with native and European stakeholders, the event of a strategic plan for additional restoring the previous Jewish quarter and publication of a number of books on Jewish cultural matters similar to meals and music.
The renovation of the Jewish quarter suits nicely with the ambitions of Tunc Soyer, the polyglot mayor of the town, to get Izmir onto the worldwide map as a metropolis of tradition.
“A mayor’s most important job is to guard his metropolis’s nature and tradition and protect the range for future generations,” Soyer instructed a small group of journalists on the sidelines of the United Cities and Native Governments (UCLG) Tradition Summit in Izmir on Sept. Sept. 11.
An unabashed socialist, Soyer was elected in 2019 on a Republican Individuals’s Celebration ticket to the town thought of a stronghold of secular opposition. He celebrates particular events with the Italian protest tune “Bella Ciao,” exchanges tweets with Paris mayor-turned-Socialist presidential candidate Anne Hidalgo and pledges to make the booming metropolis of Izmir right into a “cittaslow,” a metropolis made up of self-sufficient neighborhoods with inexperienced corridors that result in the countryside.
The municipality has renovated the Synagogue Road and helped flip Beit Hillel Oratory right into a small museum. Municipality sources say {that a} bigger plan has additionally been drafted, however not finalized, according to Izmir’s efforts to get the town’s historic middle onto the UNESCO World Heritage Record. As of 2020, it was on the UNESCO Tentative List — step one within the strategy of recognition as a world heritage web site.
“We intend to make Izmir one of many cities that has the very best variety of UNESCO websites on this planet,” Soyer stated, mentioning that the archaeological websites of Ephesus and Pergamon are already on the everlasting checklist. “Izmir is residence to many civilizations and has loads to supply to world heritage. It’s a place the place totally different cultures, peoples and faiths dwell facet by facet. It is among the world’s oldest and largest open-air museums.”
The realm consists of traces of the Hellenistic interval, historic Rome, Byzantine and the Ottoman Empire. The town’s image, the octagonal clock tower constructed to mark the twenty fifth anniversary of the enthronement of Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II, is there as nicely. The clock itself was a present by German Emperor Wilhelm II, but it surely was native businessmen, together with two notable Jewish retailers, who helped finance the development of the tower to point out allegiance to the sultan.
“The Jewish heritage mission is a vital one that matches into the bigger image of Izmir’s multilayered, multicultural identification,” Serhan Ada, an Izmirian who is among the brains behind UCLG Summit, instructed Al-Monitor. “However with Izmir, it’s not merely in regards to the previous. The town is reviving itself, with its younger artists coming again to supply right here, as a result of they’ll discover respiration house within the metropolis.”
