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FEBRUARY 10, 2022 | The Jewish Home FEBRUARY 10, 2022 | The Jewish Home
The Wandering
Jew
Istanbul, Turkey By Hershel Lieber
The Blue Mosque
W
e had just finished conducting a successf ul fundraising tour on behalf of the Yeshiva of Kishinev. Everyone had already left, and Pesi and I remained overnight in Kishinev awaiting our flight back home on Monday, December 11, 2000. I made arrangements for our flight back home to include a one-day visit to Istanbul, Turkey. I originally did not tell Pesi about this layover, as I wanted to surprise her, but the secret leaked out before we boarded the plane. I also knew that she would be apprehensive about spending a day in a Muslim country, and I would have to resort to convincing her to make this stopover. In any case, we arrived in Istanbul at 10:30 AM, and we had a twenty-four-hour window to explore the city.
At the entrance of the Topkapi Palace
The former capital of the Roman/ Byzantine, Latin/Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, Constantinople was an imperial city for almost sixteen centuries. The city named after the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great was initially a center of Catholic Christianity and later the cradle of Orthodox Christianity. Eleven-hundred years later, the Ottoman dynasty replaced Byzantium. For the past one hundred years, Turkey was a secular republic, but in recent years, the trend has been towards more conservative Islamic ideology. In the 16th and 17 th century, Istanbul became a very important Jewish center. The arrival of Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain and Portugal ushered in an era of great cultural and religious achievements for Judaism. Jews were relatively
free to work in any profession they chose, and they excelled in commerce as well as in medical careers. Since the creation of the State of Israel and the subsequent rise of the right-wing party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, most Jews have left turkey, although there still are about 15,000 Jews living in Istanbul. Enough of history. After arriving in Turkey, we quickly made it to our hotel, ate something, and went out to discover this great populous city which straddles two continents. Our first stop was at the Topkapi Palace, which was the seat of government for over three hundred years under the rulership of Ottoman sultans. Many buildings in this complex served as the private residences of the Sultan’s families. The compound, which includes many palaces and
Standing in Europe with the Bosporus and Asia in the rear
courtyards, is well over 150 acres. We took a two-hour walking tour that gave us a sampling of this stunning sprawling estate. The private family apartments were called the Harem and consisted of over four
