Free Republic

Members of Turkey’s Jewish community attend the reopening ceremony of the Great Synagogue in Edirne on March 26 after a five-year government restoration project. REUTERS Photo Just a week before Passover, Turkish Jews woke up to a morning full of excitement and hope. They got on the buses waiting to take them to Edirne, to the city that their families once had to leave following the Thrace pogroms in 1934. It was the reopening day of the Great Synagogue, which had been left in ruins for decades. “I was the last rabbi that had served in the synagogue,” said David...

Now that the ethnic-cleansing campaign of the Turkish regime has been "successfully" completed, and there are only two Jews left in Edirne, why is the governor of the city still so angry? The sweet little secret in both Turkey and Europe is that anti-Semites do not need the existence of a Jewish state to attack or threaten Jews. Hatred of Jews did not start with the re-establishment of the state of Israel. The truth is that those who carried out ethnic cleansing of Jews are the last persons who should whine about the non-existent Israeli "occupation." Israelis are not occupiers...

The governor of the northwestern province of Edirne on the Turkish-Greek border has ordered a historical synagogue be turned into a museum, citing a recent Israeli raid on al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. “When those bandits blow winds of war inside al-Aqsa and slain Muslims, we build their synagogues,” Edirne Gov. Dursun Şahin told reporters on Nov. 21. “I say this with a huge hatred inside me. We clean their graveyards, send their projects to boards. The synagogue here will be registered only as a museum, and there will be no exhibition inside it.” A main opposition lawmaker has called for...