JEWISH SENTINEL

JEWISH WORLD • NOVEMBER 18-24, 2022 27 the outset of our discussion, Selim ultimately opened up to explain that he was considering other options. “I have three daughters. Each of them are in separate countries – one in Holland, one in America, one in Canada,” he said. “We have already been thinking about leav- ing for a long time. We are prepar- ing the foundation.” J ews were present inAntioch since its founding around 300 B.C.E. by Seleucus I, one of the Diadochi — Alexander the Great’s generals and leaders of his successor states. The city first pushed itself into the crosshairs of Jewish history with a boom that reverberates to this day. During the Seleucid era, it was the base of Emperor Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who is most remem- bered today as the villain of the Hanukkah story. The Talmud later recorded visits to the city by Jewish sages, including the famed Rabbi Akiva, and generally uses Antioch as a standard for a metropolis. The Jewish presence in Antakya has far outlived that of Antiochus and his Seleucids, not to mention the Romans, Byzantines, Crusader states, Mamluks, Seljuk Turks, Ot- tomans and every other empire that ruled over the city in the past two millennia. The Jews who remain are strongly attached to the Jewish traditions they are able to practice in such a small community. Though they do not have enough observant members to comprise a regular minyan, all of the local Jews have keys to the city’s sole synagogue, erected in 1890, and stop by often. Since Antakya is al- most a straight shot north of Jeru- salem, the synagogue is one of few still functioning that was built with its ark on the southern rather than the eastern wall. All but three of the remaining Jews refrain from eating non-kosher meat, subsisting only on fish and vegetarian food for most of the year. “I am not very religious,” says Azur Cenudioglu, who claims his family has been living in Antakya since antiquity. “But I do my part. I pray in the morning and say the eve- ning prayers. We do what we can.” Even just a few decades ago, the city — and region — were en- tirely different. Daoud is the son of the city’s old kosher butcher and cantor. He said his father traveled often toAleppo, in Syria (today only two hours by car), back in the days when it was a major center of Jewish scholarship. It was home to at least 6,000 Jews, along with many synagogues and religious schools. He went to learn the slaugh- tering trade, as well as Hebrew, to serve the community in Antakya. At the time, the city was not a part of Turkey, but the French Mandate that included Syria and Lebanon. “There were 450 Jews here,” Daoud Cemel recalled. “During holidays we wouldn’t be able to find places to sit in the synagogue.” “Back then there was Shabbat, holidays, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hasha- nah, all observed properly,” Selim Cemel said. “Purim with Megillah reading, we were observing all of it.” By now, it is business more than nostalgia that ties the community to the city. “Why do I stay here, you ask? Be- cause I was born here. All my busi- ness and commerce is here. Due to the work I do, I stay here,” Selim said. David Klein covers breaking news and international Jewish communities for the Forward. During the Seleucid era, Antioch was the base of Emperor Antiochus IV, best remembered as the villain of the Hanukkah story. Antakya continued from page 14 Daoud Cemel speaks with a customer in his clothing shop in Antakya’s famed Long Bazaar. Congregation Beth Shalom staff- er Audrey Glickman (who blows a shofar in front of the building in the film’s opening sequence), Adlesic al- lowed subjects to shape the direction of their interviews. They wound up touching on a wide range of topics related to the shooting, from their own Jewish faith to gun legislation to a minute-by-minute recounting of the attack itself — all of these topics, and more, are touched on in the film. “A harrowing, horrific attack like this brings many different thoughts about what the full repercussions are,” Adlesic said. In an unusual move, the filmmak- ers also allowed their subjects to provide feedback on early cuts of the film. “My film team was like, ‘Trish?’” Adlesic recalled. “I said, ‘No, we can’t have it both ways.’ You can’t just take, you know? You also have to give. And part of that has to be within their comfort, and what they want the world to know.” One of the strangest sequences in the film unfolds about an hour outside of Pittsburgh, where a non-Jewish couple operate a gun shop out of a restored former syn- agogue — complete with stained- glass windows and a Star of Da- vid chandelier. Adlesic declined to share where the gun shop is located, saying only it was in “an old steel town” and that the shop had opened for business prior to the Tree of Life shooting. She went to interview the owner after learning about the shop from a Pittsburgh Jew in the aftermath of the shooting, and found the existence of the shop itself to be an example of “atro- cious insensitivity.” After interviewing one of the owners for the film, she attempt- ed to convince them to let her pay to remove the Jewish signifiers (“Pittsburgh is known for its bridg- es and I wanted to make a scene where I thought we could create a bridge with him”), but they turned down her offer. She hopes to ultimately raise enough money to buy the property and turn it into a museum — one of many ways the filmmakers hope to turn their documentary into a tool to fight different kinds of hate. (An an- ti-hate initiative for schools is also in the works.) Adlesic declined to share infor- mation about her own Jewish back- ground, saying she saw herself as a “conduit” and preferred the focus of the film’s coverage be on the survivors. (She has said elsewhere that her father was Jewish, and that her grandfather-in-law helped bring Jews to New York when the Nazis first came to power.) But she doesn’t see the Tree of Life shooting as sole- ly a Jewish tragedy. “I think it started out as a Jew- ish story, became a Pittsburgh sto- ry, and now it’s a universal story,” she said. “A Tree of Life” premiered on HBO on October 26 and streams on HBO Max. Andrew Lapin, a film critic for NPR, is a writer, editor and podcaster. The documentary arrives at a time when Jews are targeted by right- and left- wingers, as well as by prominent Blacks. Audrey Glickman, a survivor of the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, blows the shofar outside the building in the new HBO documentary “A Tree of Life.” Tree of Life continued from page 24