Turkey unveils Great Synagogue as Jewish population fades

EDIRNE, Turkey: When the domes of Edirne’s abandoned Great Synagogue caved in, Rifat Mitrani, the town’s last Jew, knew it spelled the end of nearly two millennia of Jewish heritage in this Turkish town.
As a boy, Mitrani studied Hebrew in the synagogue’s gardens and, in the 1970s, dispatched its Torah to Istanbul after the community shrank to just three families. In 1975, he unlocked its doors and swept away the cobwebs to marry his wife Sara.
“Only I am left. It happens slowly, becoming the last one,” said Mitrani, 65,whose family fled here more than 500 years ago.
Now a five-year, $2.5 million government project has restored the synagogue’s lead-clad domes and resplendent interior ahead of its Thursday re-opening, the first temple to open in Turkey in two generations, but one without worshippers.
It is part of a relaxation of curbs on religious minorities ushered in during President Tayyip Erdogan’s 12 years in power.
“This is not only Jewish but a part of Turkish and world heritage. It is proof that we have lived together and still do,” said Guleryuz, author of a book on Edirne’s Jews. “If we occasionally celebrate a wedding, we can keep it alive.”
The synagogue’s bright yellow exterior is a burst of light among the dilapidated wooden houses and concrete apartment blocks in Edirne’s former Jewish quarter. Inside, painters painstakingly decorated the ceiling with thousands of stars, as beams of sunlight passed through a colonnade of neat arches.
Once the Balkans’ largest Jewish temple, the Great Synagogue opened on the sultan’s decree in 1909 to serve some 20,000 Jews. It was modelled on a temple in Vienna, later destroyed by the Nazis.
Thousands of Jews left Edirne, situated near the Greek and Bulgarian borders, in 1934 when a racist mob attacked their property, but Mitrani’s father, a grocer, rebuilt his shop.
Mitrani, who owns two supermarkets here, travels to Istanbul each week to join his wife and daughters for the Sabbath.