After 24-hour op, IDF rescuers extract bodies of Turkish Jewish community leaders
Israeli team pulls bodies of Saul and Fortuna Cenudioglu from under rubble of their home in Antakya, join memorial service with victims’ family
After a 24-hour operation, IDF rescue workers on Friday managed to extract the bodies of a pair of Jewish community leaders who were killed and caught under the rubble of this week’s earthquake in Turkey.
A day earlier, the forces reached the bodies of Saul and Fortuna Cenudioglu, who had been missing in the southern Turkish town of Antakya since Monday’s earthquake hit. However, their bodies were stuck underneath the rubble of the building where they lived, requiring a complex extraction effort in order to free them.
The IDF said in a statement that its rescue workers worked around the clock, enduring complex weather conditions, until they managed to successfully pull the Cenudioglus from the rubble so that they could be properly buried.
The rescue workers then joined members of the Cenudioglu family for a memorial ceremony. Their deaths were the first confirmed reports of fatalities among the Turkish Jewish community.
An IDF delegation of army rescue specialists as well as civilian rescue organizations have been operating in Turkey to help with efforts to locate thousands of people feared still trapped under collapsed buildings.
It took the rescuers three days just to reach Antakya due to damage to roads caused by the earthquake.
On Tuesday, a leading rabbi in the Turkish Jewish community, Mendel Chitrik, said the local synagogue in Antakya “is not in a good condition, but it has not been completely destroyed. There are cracks and dramatic damage.”
Chitrik posted a video of himself helping remove Torah scrolls from the damaged synagogue in an effort to save them.
Saving ancient Torah scrolls from the earthquake damaged synagogue of Antakya – home for a Jewish community for 2500 years… #antakyadeprem pic.twitter.com/ZsHzVKdHWZ
— Rabbi Mendy Chitrik (@mchitrik) February 7, 2023
A photo posted by another user on Twitter showed the damaged Torah storage room.
“The end of a 2,500-year-old love story,” the user wrote.
2500 yıllık bir aşk hikayesinin sonu ????#antakyadepremi pic.twitter.com/cu64N97B4P
— ishak ibrahimzadeh (@ishak5723) February 7, 2023
There has been a Jewish community in Antakya for over 2,500 years, although there are thought to only be 12 elderly members left, including the couple who died.
Chitrik has reported that as far as he knows, there were no other fatalities or missing people among Turkish Jewish communities, though some were rescued from collapsed buildings.
The confirmed death toll across the two countries has soared above 21,000 after a swarm of strong tremors near the Turkey-Syria border — the largest of which measured at a massive 7.8-magnitude on Monday.
