»Case Not Closed.«
A search for traces of Berliner Jews with Turkish citizenship
»When I heard that there is a project called »Case Not Closed« and it deals with Turkish Jews, I thought: Wait! Is that a spelling mistake?« Mahmoud – project participant from Berlin
About one hundred years ago, people with Turkish citizenship lived in Berlin. A large part of them was Jewish. Many of them worked in the carpet or tobacco business. An important meeting place for the cohesion of the community was the Israelite-Sephardic Association, which also ran a school from 1915. The Turkish Jews in Berlin were persecuted during National Socialism and deported to concentration camps, e.g. to Ravensbrück in Brandenburg and Buchenwald in Thuringia. Many of these people were murdered, and only a few were freed from the camps. Some of them ended up in Turkey, where they were not allowed to stay, and then lived in different countries.
In the project »Case Not Closed«, from 2021 to 2022, youth groups from Thuringia, Berlin and Istanbul did research on life stories of families who lived in Berlin until 1943, were Jewish and had Turkish citizenship. This project, with its search for traces, wants to contribute to making these life stories more visible, to commemorate people who were murdered and persecuted and to deal with racism and anti-Semitism in the past and today. Four video portraits emerged out of the research materials and activities: Portraits of the Dingenthal, Jacobsohn, Singer and Vitalis families. In Turkey, young participants of the project developed a short film on anti-Semitism and remembrance culture in Istanbul.
Project Videos by the Participants
Workshops from 2023
From autumn 2023 on, workshops will be offered in Thuringia and Berlin for young people to make the life stories better known and the findings of the project accessible to others. The youths and young adults who have been involved in the project since the beginning will accompany the workshops as peer guides and offer other young people insights into the results of their research and their questions and discussions during the research process.
The follow-up project is implemented in cooperation with the Turkish Community in Germany and funded by the Federal Agency for Civic Education.
Project video by SEHAK
In this documentary, participants from Istanbul discuss antisemitism in its historical and contemporary manifestations as well as different approaches towards Jews in Turkey.
In the project »Case Not Closed«, the Turkish group searched for traces of the story of 25 Jewish people who had the Turkish citizenship and were living in Berlin during Holocaust. Almost for a whole year, young participants of the project searched for traces of those 25 individuals, some of whom were murdered in the concentration camps Buchenwald and Ravensbrück, to commemorate the Jews with Turkish citizenship. Some others managed to escape from Germany to Turkey. They did it to Istanbul, however, the Turkish state didn´t allow them to stay. They were imprisoned until they managed to get permissions to move further to other countries.
In the archives of Turkish newspapers, no information about those people was found, as if they never existed. Therefore, the group chose another way to discover and tell the story of 25 individuals, namely with the method of memory walk – an innovative educational filming method that encourages young people to critically reflect on historical facts in their living environment. In this memory walk, the youngsters have been trained to conduct interviews on historical facts and to reflect on different interpretations of those facts for themselves and their communities in present-day society. They worked together to create this movie, which is about Turkish Jews and antisemitism, and explored related controversies and discussions.
For this movie, participants of the project spent three days interviewing and filming in the streets of Istanbul. Besides interviewing random people on the street, they had conversations with experts, historians and also with historical witnesses, which was a good opportunity for them to learn more. With all these materials, they sought answers to the question: What was the Turkish ideology and attitude towards Jews in the past and today?
A retrospective: Flow of the project during 2021-22
The Anne Frank Zentrum implemented the project »Case Not Closed. A Search for Traces of Berliner Jews with Turkish Citizenship« in cooperation with the Turkish Community in Germany and SEHAK in Istanbul.
Participants from both countries met online and on-site in Berlin and Istanbul and exchanged ideas. In seminars, participants visited the places where the families lived and also the memorials of the concentration camps Ravensbrück and Buchenwald, to which the families were deported. They learned about National Socialism and had exchange on forms of commemoration of the murdered and persecuted Jews in Germany and Turkey. The participants tried to comprehend the paths that the survivors went through and reflected on the continuities of racism and anti-Semitism up to today's societies. The participants were accompanied by multipliers, for whom a special training series was implemented during the project.
