Izmir was home to one of the most renowned Jewish communities and rabbinic libraries in the Ottoman Empire. Now, despite Turkey’s increasingly hostile posture toward Israel and complicated relationship with its Jewish citizens, the ancient port city on Turkey’s Aegean coast is witnessing the rebirth of that library thanks to the efforts of Izmir-born Dina Eliezer.

In 1999, Eliezer, a Jewish educator from Philadelphia who grew up in Israel, was invited by Izmir community leader Sara Pardo to help start a Jewish education program for children. On the last day of Eliezer’s stay, Pardo brought her to Chacham Chane, the former headquarters of Izmir’s rabbinate. According to Eliezer, what she saw there broke her heart—a collapsing roof, water-stained walls, mold and rot everywhere, and hundreds of books in various states of decay.

Eliezer recalled turning to Pardo and saying, “You are murderers! This is the treasure of your community. Look what you’re doing to it.” She then moderated her tone and jumped in to help. “We have to get them out of here ASAP.” 

Over the next five summers, Eliezer, who is a member of Hadassah, returned to Izmir to help clean and move the books to a room in the local Karatas Jewish hospital. In the process, she created a list of the more than 1,700 books that were salvageable, among them rabbinic responsa and collections of sermons. Several of them date to the 17th century, and over 450 include marginalia—notes handwritten in Ladino into the margins of the texts—from illustrious Izmir rabbis such as Yosef Escapa, Moshe Benveniste and Haim Palachi.

“These are books that the rabbis themselves studied with,” Eliezer said, noting that they also serve as windows into what was once one of the most vibrant Jewish communities anywhere.

Still, the books sat in the hospital storage room for nearly two decades before Eliezer spearheaded the effort to turn the collection into a library. Eventually, with funding from the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe and the Kiriaty Foundation International, the books and their marginalia were digitized and made available on the website of Izmir’s Jewish community center. And in December 2024, 630 pages of text from various volumes became available through KTIV, a digital platform of the National Library of Israel.

Meanwhile, the physical collection at the Karatas hospital, managed by Turkish-Hebrew-English translator Yudit Sevinir, is now opened to visitors. Like Eliezer, Sevinir is an Izmir native who spent decades in Israel. Among the works she has translated from Hebrew into Turkish is Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld’s novel To the Edge of Sorrow.

“Thanks to Dina’s work,” Sevinir said, “the Izmir Jewish community now has an important part of its heritage available for generations to come.”

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Avi Dresner