'There is nothing left'

The Jerusalem Post ^ | 16 November 2003 | TOVAH LAZAROFF

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Nov. 16, 2003
'There is nothing left'
By TOVAH LAZAROFF

Two months ago Vicky Angel celebrated her cousin's wedding in the Neveh Shalom Synagogue in Istanbul. On Sunday, she stood in its ruins, having arrived from Israel the night before as part of an eight person assistance delegation from the Jewish Agency.

"It is so sad, there is nothing left," said Angel explaining that 80 percent of the building was destroyed in the blast, that disrupted a bar-mitzvah prayer service on Shabbat morning. The twin blasts outside both Neveh Shalom and Beth Israel Synagogue about three miles away, killed 23, including six Jews.

"All the prayer shawls were on the floor, I felt so bad," said Angel, who heads the Jewish Agency's Turkish desk.

"I went two times to see the road where everything exploded. There were television cameras and hundreds of people looking a the place, they can not believe it."

She first heard about the explosions when she turned on the radio Saturday morning. Immediately, she called the head of the Turkish Jewish community.

Then she got to work organizing an delegation to Turkey. She has come to Turkey a number of times in the aftermath of disasters, such as the earthquake and the terrorist attack on the Neveh Shalom synagogue in 1986.

Neveh Shalom was the largest synagogue in Istanbul and acted as a community center as well as a place of worship.

It is the only synagogue where you can have weddings and funerals," said Angel, adding that it would have been the natural place to hold the funerals of the six victims, which will now be held instead in the cemetery on Tuesday morning.

The second largest synagogue, was Beth Israel which was also gutted in the attack. Neveh Shalom, however, was more severely damaged and the community is contemplating moving the synagogue to a new more secure location rather than rebuilding this one.

There are some seven synagogues in Istanbul, said Angel, but the other five are small. They can only hold 20 to 50 people. The larger community now has no place to pray on Shabbat, said Angel.

She included in the Jewish Agency delegation two doctors, originally from Turkey, one who specializes in emergency room medicine and the other in trauma.

"I have having a lot of phone calls of the people who needed our help," said Angel.

In the hospital they offered medical advice and comforted the 20 or so wounded and their families. "We hugged them and told the Israeli government and the Jewish Agency is behind them," said Angel. The head of the delegation Amos Herman added that they also took care to visit the Muslim victims as well.

Angel said she and the other delegates visited a guard who saw the car that exploded. He almost lost both his legs, she said.

They visited the families of the dead. Angel said she was struck by the way the attack devastated at least two families. The eight year old girl who died, along with her grandmother, was an only child. The girl's mother is divorced and is now alone, said Angel.

Similarly, the pregnant woman who died, had lost both her parents an earth quake in Turkey. Her brother is now the family's sole survivor. "I am coming from here, but I do not feel like I am any different from them," said Angel. "I live in Jerusalem, I know what it means to be in a country where you have attacks all the time," said Angel.

The delegation met with the Jewish community and the chief rabbi, as well as Turkey's Foreign Minister and Prime Minister.

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