Several hundred Jews in Istanbul participated in what is said to have been the city’s first public lighting of Hanukkah candles in decades. The ceremony took place on Sunday evening in Ortakoy, a neighborhood on the European banks of the Bosporus Straits. Leading the celebration was Isaac Ibrahimzadeh, the president of the Jewish Community of…
Selin Rozanes’s family, like most Sephardim in Turkey, likely came to the country in the late 15th century, when Jews were expelled from Spain. Sultan Bayezid II welcomed these exiled Jews into the Ottoman Empire at the time, where they would end up living, and cooking, alongside native Turks. Today, Rozanes helps to preserve the…
Passover in my family has rarely been a formal affair. At one point, when I was a child and my family still observed a few watered-down traditions plucked out of the Jewish canon, we would gather round a makeshift Seder table to read selections from the ShopRite Haggadah. A Seder plate and stack of supermarket…
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