President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said at a campaign rally that “Jewish capital” was behind The New York Times. Erdogan made his remarks a day before Turks voted on Sunday. Polls predicted victory for Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, though with a much smaller margin than in 2011. On Saturday, Erdogan…
Spain’s embassy in Ankara disputed a New York Times article claiming that thousands of Turkish Jews have applied for Spanish citizenship amid growing concern about anti-Semitism. The May 26 Times article speaks of “thousands of Sephardic Jews in Turkey who trace their ancestry to Spain and are now applying for Spanish citizenship in anticipation of…
(JTA) — In the backyard of the Etz Ahayim synagogue in Turkey’s largest city, congregant Yusuf Arslan hollers pleasantries as he mingles with other members of the small congregation. He needs to shout to be heard over the deafening sound of a sudden downpour hitting the blast-proof glass ceiling that stretches over the synagogue’s spacious…
The Union for Reform Judaism urged President Barack Obama to use the word “genocide” in describing the murder of 1.5 million Armenians. Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the union’s president, made the call in an open letter he sent to Obama on Thursday, ahead of the centennial anniversary of what is widely known as the Armenian Genocide….
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…
דאָס בוך איז גרונטיק געפֿאָרשט, לעבעדיק אָנגעשריבן — אָבער אידעאָלאָגיש באַפֿאַרבט
