The head of Turkey's Jewish community complained on Sunday that a Jewish wedding in the recently reopened synagogue of Edirne triggered a deluge of anti-Semitic speech online.
Ishak Ibrahimzadeh said that some social network users had responded with hate speech to his invitation to watch the live streaming of the first Jewish wedding in 41 years in Edirne, a city in western Turkey near its border with Greece whose synagogue re-opened last year following a four-decade-long closure.
Some users wrote "kill the Jews", and one posted online: "Such a pity that Hitler didn’t finish the job." Others referenced "occupied Palestine," according to the Israeli news site NRG.
On Twitter, Ibrahimzadeh urged the Turkish Justice Ministry and the Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights Inquiry to investigate those responsible for the hate speech for inciting racist hatred. "Don’t the comments on Periscope about the Edirne synagogue constitute a hate crime?" Ibrahimzadeh asked.
Rufat Mitrani, the patriarch of the only Jewish family living in Edirne, had married his wife Sara before the synagogue was abandoned in the 1970s due to a lack of community members. His daughter Güneş married Harun Erentürk from the Jewish community of Istanbul.
Edirne Mayor Recep Gürkan officiated at the wedding, while provincial governor Mehmet Tekinarslan and Osman Güneren, local director of the state-run Foundations Directorate that oversaw the restoration of the synagogue, acted as witnesses.
Gürkan said he was pleased to officiate "a special, unique" wedding, while Tekinarslan said he hoped the couple's descendants would also call Edirne their home. The city's Jewish population dwindled considerably in the first half of 20th century due to anti-Semitic sentiment, forcing the community to abandon the city for Istanbul and abroad.
Almost all of the hundreds of guests came from Istanbul, elsewhere in Turkey and beyond to the wedding. They cheered and whistled as a relative of the bride lifted the hem of her wedding dress to show off her white shoes. After the ceremony, guests danced the hora, a Balkan dance that is also popular in Israel and at American Jewish weddings.
