Posted on 05/28/2015 5:13:13 PM PDT by SJackson
Frances Martel27 May 201545
The increasingly difficult-to-ignore presence of anti-Semitic attitudes in Turkey is forcing Sephardic Jews, whose ancestors were welcomed in the Ottoman Empire after being expelled from their homes due to the Inquisition, to consider returning to Spain and rebuilding their lives there, now that the nation’s legislature is poised to grant them passports.
The New York Times reports that Spain’s Sephardic Ancestry Bill, which is expected to pass this month and would grant dual Spanish citizenship to the Jewish descendants of those expelled from the nation in 1492, is posing an increasingly tempting option to Jews in Istanbul who find themselves increasingly the targets of discrimination in the land in which they were born and raised.
The incidents are many and vary in intensity; Rafi, a 25-year-old Sephardic Jew from Istanbul, tells the Times that a crossword puzzle in a newspaper honoring Adolf Hitler made him think, “there is no future here.”
“Last year the level of hate speech in Turkey reached an unnerving level,” he explained. Among other incidents listed are a running tab of anti-Semitic statements by politicians on television, and a particularly vicious social media rant by Turkish singer Yildiz Tilbe that culminated in “May God bless Hitler.” “I applaud you,” replied the mayor of Ankara.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
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I wonder how many are actually leaving vs getting a passport for contingencies.
Out of the frying pan into the ... not the fire, but into the smoked-meats case at the supermarket, at least.
+1
I read it in a biography of Ataturk.
Talk about coming full circle.
It is not a new measure to give the Sephardic Jews the Spanish citizenship. During the Holocaust, and with 20 German divisions threatening to cross Spain to take over Gibraltar and close the Mediterranean to the Allies, Franco declared the Sephardic Jews as Spanish citizens (as descendants of the Jews expelled in 1492 by the Catholic Kings) who were living in Nazi occupied Europe citizens and opened for them the doors of a country devastate by a civil war. Thanks to Franco more than 60,000 Jews saved their lives, while Franklin Delano Roosevelt denied the Jews refuge in U.S. and England denied them to enter Palestine.
I’d be astonished if they didn’t already have a contingency passport.
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