I stood outside an armored synagogue in Istanbul and realized why I’m a Zionist

Forty years ago, on Sept. 6, 1986, terrorists armed with machine guns and grenades stormed Neve Shalom Synagogue in Istanbul during Shabbat morning prayers. Twenty-two Jews were murdered in minutes. The attack was attributed to the Abu Nidal Organization, and when the congregation rebuilt, it left the bullet marks in the marble beside the ark unrepaired. They wanted everyone who prayed there to remember.This summer, I stood outside those doors, though I could not get in.A minute’s walk away, the line outside Galata Tower stretched around the block. Tourists carried freshly squeezed orange juice while vendors pulled simit from ovens that had barely cooled since dawn. Ferries crossed the Bosphorus below, stitching Europe and Asia together as they have for centuries. Then the afternoon call to prayer rose from the city’s minarets. It was beautiful, unfamiliar, and a quiet reminder that I was far from home. There was no line outside Neve Shalom, the largest synagogue in Turkey and, for generations, the heart of Istanbul’s Jewish community. Steel barriers, surveillance cameras, armed officers, and an armored police vehicle stood guard. When I asked whether I could go inside, the officer explained politely that visitors had to register weeks in advance, submit a passport, and undergo a background check. As I stepped away, a woman who overheard me speaking Russian stopped me.“You won’t get in,” she said. “Not after the bombing.”She was a tour guide, referring to the 2003 truck bombings of Neve Shalom and Beth Israel, the third time terrorists had struck the synagogue since 1986. She told me antisemitism had become more visible since Oct. 7, 2023, and she worried about Turkey’s hostile rhetoric toward Israel, but she refused to reduce millions of Turks to the words of their government.“In the end,” she said, “most people just want a normal life.”I heard versions of that sentence throughout my two weeks in Turkey. I came to study a country. Instead, I found myself asking what it means for Jews to have a home.Five centuries ago, the Ottoman Empire took in Jews expelled from Spain. Ladino-filled marketplaces, synagogues, schools, and businesses became part of the fabric of Istanbul and Izmir. Today, roughly 14,000 Jews remain in Turkey. Communities contract gradually: a family leaves, a school closes, a synagogue adds another security barrier. Eventually, what was once ordinary requires protection.That history followed me. I observed the Sabbath, hunted for kosher food, and explained Jewish practice to people who had never knowingly met an observant Jew. The landscapes were breathtaking and the people warm and curious. But I am part of a people whose history is filled with places that were once home. That tension was impossible to ignore.I am a religious Jew and a Zionist. Those identities do not require me to see Turks as enemies or dismiss the hospitality I encountered. But Jewish history is not simply a story of coexistence. It is also a story of impermanence. Jewish life should not depend entirely on the goodwill of a host society, and yet, it increasingly does around the world.The question is not whether Jews are allowed to remain. It is whether they can imagine remaining. There is a difference between being tolerated and believing your grandchildren will still belong.I left Turkey with conflicting emotions. I met people who were generous and eager to share their culture, but I also saw how antisemitism can make Jewish life feel conditional. Both are true. I can reject the idea that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks for every Turk, distinguish criticism of Israel from antisemitism, and still believe Jews deserve a place where our existence is not contingent on a majority’s acceptance.That, to me, is the heart of Zionism.Not the belief that Jews cannot live anywhere else, or that Israel is beyond criticism. It is the belief that after centuries of building lives in places that could cease to be home, the Jewish people should have a home of our own, where our safety and future are in our own hands.Travel did not make me less certain of my Zionism. It made me understand it differently. The lesson of Jewish history is not that Jews can never belong anywhere else. It is that we should never again be without somewhere that is unequivocally ours.VANCE JUST ‘JEWSPLAINED’ CARLSON’S ANTISEMITISM TO AMERICAN JEWS — AND THE REPUBLICAN JEWISH COALITION CHEEREDThe call to prayer was unfamiliar to me, but the security outside the synagogue was not.That contrast is what I carried home: centuries of Jewish history, and the quiet sadness of watching it disappear. There is at least now one place in the world where Jewish permanence is not supposed to depend on anyone else’s permission.Danielle Sobkin is an alumna of the University of California, Berkeley, and now works in finance in New York.