Un Libro Avierto - What is it?
How It Began?
My journey with Jewish community work began in 2019, when I worked as a youth coordinator for the Jewish community of İzmir. That role gave me a deeper sense of how cultural identity is shaped and sustained through everyday community life. I organised activities for young people, supported communal events, and started thinking more carefully about how heritage can be passed on in meaningful and relevant ways.
Later, I co-developed and managed Despertar İzmir, a community development project that ran from 2021 to 2023. The project was supported by the European Union, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), and several other organisations. Its focus was on cultural memory and visibility. We produced a documentary, led a series of training sessions, hosted a public conference in İzmir, and curated a week-long culture festival with a photo exhibition, talks, and a Sephardic food tasting. The project allowed me to explore new ways of telling stories within and beyond the community, while also exposing the lack of wider awareness in Turkey about Jewish life and culture.
In 2022 and 2023, I joined the Yesod Kaplan Fellowship, a programme for Jewish community professionals across Europe. As part of the fellowship, I took part in seminars held in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Berlin and Barcelona. These gatherings gave me a chance to meet others working in similar roles, exchange experiences, and reflect more deeply on long-term strategies for inclusive, sustainable, and locally grounded initiatives.
I continued this learning journey in August 2023, when I participated in a Jewish heritage seminar at the University of Amsterdam. Then, from January to April 2024, I took part in a Jewish heritage course organised by Central European University, with sessions in both Vienna and Budapest. These experiences helped me understand how Jewish heritage is approached across different European contexts, and what lessons might be relevant for Turkey.
Throughout all of this, one idea kept growing clearer. In Turkey, there is still a serious shortage of high-quality, accessible resources in Turkish about Jewish life, culture, and history. Much of what exists is either academic, untranslated, or simply unknown to the wider public. I kept meeting students, educators, and civil society workers who were eager to learn more but struggled to find the right tools.
From Learning to Action
In 2024, I took part in two programmes that helped shape the direction of Un Libro Avierto. In June, I joined the Hrant Dink Foundation’s Minority Rights Academy in Istanbul, which later continued online. The following month, I participated in the Paideia Summer Incubator for Jewish Culture in Stockholm, Sweden. Each programme offered a different perspective on identity, inclusion, and how to bring underrepresented stories into public life.
During both experiences, I began thinking more seriously about the role of education. Not just academic research or lectures, but learning that is open, accessible, and relevant to the public. I decided to focus on something specific. I wanted to find ways to introduce Jewish studies and contemporary Jewish communities to a wider Turkish-speaking audience, especially to university students who are curious but often lack access to accurate, well-presented resources in their own language.
There are strong institutions across Europe that engage with Jewish culture in creative and meaningful ways. But in Turkey, there are still very few efforts to do this work in Turkish, or to link local perspectives with global conversations. I saw a clear need for something new, something that could support both learners and educators and help make Jewish life and history more visible in Turkish public space.
This was the moment when Un Libro Avierto began to take shape more clearly. What had started as a question now had a direction and a goal.
What Un Libro Avierto Will Offer
After years of working in different programmes and seeing both the potential and the gaps, I wanted to create something that could be shared, adapted, and used by others. Un Libro Avierto is designed as a learning platform in Turkish that brings together reliable, accessible materials about Jewish life, history, and culture — both in Turkey and around the world.
It will be open to anyone, but it especially focuses on Turkish-speaking university students, educators, and people working in civil society. The goal is to support critical thinking, reduce misinformation, and make Jewish culture more visible and better understood in Turkey.
Here’s what the project will include:
A Turkish-language book introducing global Jewish communities, cultural diversity, and contemporary Jewish life. It will be available as a free PDF.
Four learning modules designed for use in universities and informal education settings. Each one will focus on a different theme, such as antisemitism, cultural diversity, and memory.
A dedicated website where all materials will be shared freely. The website will also include short videos and suggested resources.
A digital guide for using artificial intelligence in education, to help learners and educators explore the content more actively and interactively.
Workshops and pilot sessions in Istanbul, İzmir and online, to test the materials and collect feedback.
A community of 25 contributors, including students, teachers, researchers and activists, who will help develop the content and shape the project based on their experience and needs.
The aim is to create something useful and long-lasting that can be built on in the future. Everything will be published openly, so others can adapt and reuse it in their own work.
