PROJECT OF U.S. FILM MAKER : A DOCUMENTARY ON JEWS IN ISTANBUL

An attack by Arab gunmen on a synagogue here last September fleetingly focused world attention on the anomaly of a small Jewish community in one of the world’s largest Muslim countries.

Many outside Turkey were hardly aware of the existence of the 22,000-strong Jewish community here, let alone its rich history and traditions. The Jews of Istanbul are descendants of the Jews who fled Spain and Portugal in 1492, during the Inquisition.

There was much intolerance in medieval Western Europe, but the Jews who settled in Istanbul were valued (and exploited) by the Ottoman Empire. They brought with them their own language, Ladino, a melange of Hebrew and Spanish, which persists today.

In an effort to chronicle the story of the Jewish community in time for the 500th anniversary of the emigration from Spain, an American film maker named Laurence Salzmann is currently working on a documentary tentatively titled “500 Years: Sephardim in Turkey.”

Salzmann, an American Jew from Philadelphia, has been at work for three years on the project, and he reckons it will take at least one more year to complete.

“The thing that really struck me was how the Jews here preserve their heritage,” Salzmann said in an interview, “as well as the relationships with their Turkish hosts, who for the most part have given the Jews gracious treatment.”

Turkey is one of the few Islamic countries that has good relations with both Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, although for economic reasons relations with the Jewish state are conducted quietly.

After last September’s attack on the synagogue, however, there was an outraged reaction in Turkey, and the prime minister attended the funerals of the victims.

After the attack, Salzmann said, Jews in Turkey became “very security-conscious and much more skeptical of people they don’t know.”

But with two years’ work already behind him, Salzmann had been accepted into the community and has had no difficulty continuing his filming.

The project began three years ago, when the chief rabbi of Istanbul asked Salzmann and his wife, Ayse, to chronicle Jewish monuments.

He had made two earlier documentaries for PBS, “Song of Radauti,” about the Jewish community in Romania, and “Who’s Havin’ Fun?” about the tradition of mummery in Philadelphia.

With his past experience, particularly on the Romania film, Salzmann began raising money from sources in the United states and Turkey for the film on the Jews of Turkey. He said he still needs about $100,000 to complete the project.

Salzmann’s wife was born in Turkey and is not Jewish. She is co-producing the film. Having a Turkish spouse has proved a mixed blessing to the film, according to Salzmann.

“It wasn’t as good as I thought it would be,” he said. “Having a Turkish wife in Turkey on a Jewish film got a lot of people upset initially. But now everyone accepts her.”

Language has been a major problem. Much of the literature about Jews in the Ottoman Empire has appeared in French, and the Jews here tend to speak either Ladino or Turkish.

Salzmann said that he is getting around the problem with an English narration or by having one member of a group speak in English, conveying the thoughts of the entire group.

“They try to have a low profile for the most part,” Salzmann said of the group. “At one point I thought maybe it was a good idea to leave them alone so they would not be disturbed by the outside world. But the attack on Nove Shalom (synagogue) made it impossible for them to remain anonymous any longer.”