Our Daily News Letter

(By Our Constantinople Correspondent, Marc Regenstreif)

The financial position of the Jewish communal institutions of Constantinople, including that of the Grand Rabbinate, is a very precarious one, the officials are scantily and irregularly paid and the communal buildings are falling into decay. These conditions are described in detail in a memorandum submitted to the B’nai B’rith here by a well known Jewish notable of this city, Shemaya Angel.

It appears from this memorandum that the Jewish Community of Constantinople was not long ago in possession of a great number of buildings and much land which had been granted either by special royal decree or by deeds which had been passed by the Survey Department. But under Turkish law a community could not own property in its own name, so the freehold deeds were made out in the name of one or another of the leaders of the Jewish community of Constantinople. who, in their turn, established the community’s right to the property by private treaty. For a time this worked very well. There came a time, however, when it was found that the property held by the community was beginning to change hands. The nominal owners, according to the memorandum, without consulting the community had sold the community’s property and had retained the proceeds for themselves. Investigations were made and it was discovered that the papers which established the right of the community as the real owners of the property had not been filed with the Grand Rabbinate as they should have been, but had been entrusted to the very people to whom the property had been nominally transferred. When they died, their heirs pretended that they knew nothing of any arrangements with the community, and insisted that the property was theirs alone.

The Grand Rabbinate, the memorandum charges, did its business in an unbusinesslike manner. No record was kept of the buildings belonging to the community. In 1329 of the Moslem Era (1913) the Government asked the Grand Rabbinate for a complete list of the buildings and land belonging to the Jewish community of Constantinople, registered in the names of particular persons, in order to carry out legal retransfer of all this property to the community. Mr. Angel states in his memorandum that three lists were sent in reply to the Survey Department of the Ministry of Justice, and even those lists were not complete and did not include everything.

Two years later the Survey Department requested the Grand Rabbinate to supply a new list, but with the exception of the Jewish communities of the suburbs of Galata, Chichti, Haida, Pasha, and Ostakeny, nothing has been done in the past ten years. Things were allowed to drift with the result that the financial situation of the Jewish communities in the other suburbs of Constantinople is now in a state of chaos.

Mr. Angel claims that 16 buildings in Constantinople, belonging to the Jewish community, are still registered in the name of private people, who are benefitting from them. In view of the great value of these buildings, Mr. Angel urges that the community should once and for all establish its right to them and thus bring about an improvement in the financial position of the Jewish institutions which otherwise will be completely ruined.