JEWISH WORLD

14 JEWISH WORLD • NOVEMBER 18-24, 2022 a Jewish clothing merchant with a shop in the city’s famed Long Ba- zaar — a snaking maze of Ottoman Era caravanserais and even older shops, rivaling Istanbul’s Grand Ba- zaar or Jerusalem’s Arab Shuk. In it, By DAVID I. KLEIN J ews have lived in the city of Antakya, known in ancient times as Antioch, for over 23 centuries. And the city wants visi- tors to know that. A symbol composed of a Star of David a Christian cross and an Islamic crescent has practically become the city’s logo, as it’s plas- tered all over town, especially on restaurants peddling the patently spicy cuisine popular Hatay, Tur- key’s southernmost province. “I was born in Antakya and I will die in Antakya,” said Selim Cemel, one can find everything from textiles to spices to some of the best hum- mus in Turkey. He is one of only 14 members of the Jewish community left in the city. The Star of David imagery is so Turkish nationalists and Kurdish separatists that culminated in a 1980 military coup. “Some have died, some moved to Istanbul, and the youth left one by one. This is the way they dis- persed,” explained Daoud Cemel, a relative of Selim and another Jew- ish merchant in the Long Bazaar who sells towels and other textiles. Daoud lives in Antakya with his wife Olga, a Syrian Jewwho moved to the city from Damascus 25 years ago. Like many in Antakya, which had long been associated more closely with bordering Syria than Turkey, they speak Arabic at home. Their children, like so many oth- ers in Antakya, are long gone. Be- fore Shabbat dinner at her home, Olga proudly showed off a picture from a granddaughter’s birthday in Tel Aviv, and one of a son who is a doctor in Germany. D aoud had tried living in Is- rael and even enrolled in an ulpan course to learn Hebrew, but he found the lifestyle there too different and earning a living dif- ficult. Still, he, Olga and even his 90-year-old mother Adile hope to make the move there permanent some day. Despite his proud statement at The Last Jews Of Antakya Only 14 remain in the once heavily Jewish Turkish city prevalent that one would be forgiven for thinking Jews were a significant portion of the city’s 200,000-strong population. In reality, barely more than a dozen Jews remain. The youngest member of the community is over 60, and many are talking about joining their chil- dren elsewhere in the world. Like many cities in Turkey, An- takya has been seeing youth of all faiths and ethnicities move over the past century to the metropolises of Istanbul and Ankara. Today, one in four Turks live in Istanbul. For Antakya’s Jews, the exodus began in the 1970s, when Turkey experienced a period of particular political instability. The first half of the decade saw Turkey embroiled in a civil war in Cyprus, and in the second, a breakout of sectarian vi- olence across the country between The Jewish presence in Antakya has far outlived that of every empire that ruled the city in the last 2,000 years. JEWISH TRAVEL Exterior (left) and interior of Antakya’s only remaining synagogue. An aerial view of Antakya, Turkey. continued on page 27 ” IT WILL BLOW “ YOUR MIND! -OPRAH WINFREY - I Telecharge.com or 212.239.6200 New World Stages 340 W. 50th St. moc.wohSelbbuBnoillizaG MORE UNBUBBLIEVABLE THAN EVER! BLIE