The Jewish Community Center in Izmir Has Finally Opened Its Doors

January 17, 2020
Alp Cen

Izmir, Turkey

Class of 2022

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Over the last few years, our chapter, LIGA, has faced struggles to organize events such as weekly programs (peulot), casual meetings, and BBYO conventions. This year, however, the new Jewish Community Center has enabled us to overcome these problems by giving us new opportunities, including having a whole new separate floor in the building. Furthermore, we can now host our big events like Global Shabbat in our center rather than looking for large places like hotels. 

Moreover, the new building contains lots of other interesting parts: Its ground and first floor is a synagogue. You should all know, that unlike our century-old synagogues throughout the city, this one has a very modern look. Though it has some traditional Sephardic elements as well. 

The second floor belongs to the headquarters of the Jewish Community Foundation of İzmir. The third floor is our Sunday School, offering after-school programs to primary school-aged children in our community. 


Lastly, the fourth floor is LIGA, our chapter! We do most of our planning, such as little Shabbat parties, movie nights, and other programs here. However, sometimes we need big spaces for bigger events like any other community in the building. So, we use the basement floor ‘The Event Floor. It's a big room which is specifically designed for big events such as Global Shabbat, as I previously mentioned. 

Overall, the new Jewish Community Center has enabled us to plan and perform our activities easier by providing us with more space to work and use in many ways. 

Alp Cen is an Aleph from the Liga chapter in Turkey and plays the guitar.

All views expressed on content written for The Shofar represent the opinions and thoughts of the individual authors. The author biography represents the author at the time in which they were in BBYO.

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