Laurence Salzmann and his wife Ayşe Gürsan-Salzmann undertook a project for the Chief Rabbinate of Istanbul to come to Turkey and document Jewish monuments throughout the country. The couple visited 32 towns and cities in four geographical regions of Turkey, sometimes returning to previously visited places to confirm facts or add more data and renew old acquaintances. They have produced the book ´Travels in Search of Turkey’s Jews´

The role of the peripatetic photographer seems to come naturally to Laurence Salzmann. A native of Philadelphia in the U.S., he has worked as a photographer and filmmaker since the early 1960s. His projects document the lives of little-known groups in America and abroad. He looks at the lives of people ranging from guests in single-room occupancy hotels in New York City to transhumant shepherds in Transylvania, residents of a Mexican village, the Philadelphia Mummers and Jewish communities.

Salzmann and his wife, Ayşe Gürsan-Salzmann, undertook a project for the Istanbul Chief Rabbinate to come to Turkey and document Jewish monuments throughout the country. The invitation came through the encouragement of the Beth Hatefursoth Museum in Tel Aviv, which was interested in adding to its photo archive of Jewish monuments worldwide. A two-month project subsequently became a five-year project in the second half of the 1980s and expanded to include a film, in-depth documentation and an ethnographic portrait of the community. The latter was provided by Gürsan-Salzmann, who is a noted anthropologist.

To produce "Travels in Search of Turkey’s Jews," the Salzmann couple visited 32 towns and cities in four geographical regions of Turkey, sometimes returning to previously visited places to confirm facts or add more data and renew old acquaintances.

The contents of the book, with each chapter a different location, weave the authors’ personal experiences and observations with the anecdotes told by some of the few remaining members of the Jewish community there and elderly Turks who remembered those who had gone. The variety of stories and the different discoveries make the book hard to put down. Each town or village is illustrated with color and/or black-and-white photos of people and synagogues, stores and cemeteries, all of which add flavor to the book.

Salzmann spoke with the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review about the book he has put together with his wife. “As I have been getting older I have been organizing all of my photographic works and preparing what I call my photographic legacy so that it can be made more available to a wider audience in the future. ‘Travels in Search of Turkey´s Jews’ is part of that legacy of documenting communities in different parts of the world.

“This work itself had been anxiously looking for a publisher for the past 24 years. Fortune, or as they say in Turkey kismet, brought us together with Rıifat Bali [at Libra Press], who offered very graciously to be this book´s publisher. As it turns out, he has also offered very good editing advice, which has helped to make a much better book than it would have been had it been published 10 years ago.

“Some times being patient is very worthwhile. Today the world of publishing is very different than what it was 25 years ago [the pre-digital age]. So our book has benefited from these new technologies.”

Asked what he hoped the reader would remember from their book, Salzmann said: “That there had been a very diverse and geographical widespread Jewish community living on Turkish lands. This has changed. The Jewish community left living in Turkey today is about one-eighth the size it was in its heyday. That was when the Ottoman Empire ruled.”

Tourists in Turkey are generally unaware of restrictions on taking photographs. Flash and tripods usually carry an extra fee. But the professional has to obtain permission from the authorities in charge of the place or places to be photographed, such as the interiors of monuments and buildings. This can be time-consuming and nerve-wracking if you’re interested in a sensitive place.

Salzmann cannot say that there was one particularly great challenge. “One challenge always was getting all the permissions lined up in each town we visited so we could photograph. In the 1980s Turkey was very permission-oriented and an “izin” [permission] was needed for everything but that was part of the process and in that I was greatly aided by my wife Ayşe. If you will recall, we were not even allowed to mail a cassette tape when I lived in Turkey in the 1980s.”

Gürsan-Salzmann prepared the text that goes with her husband’s photographs. Salzmann says of the result: “This work was from beginning to end a collaborative effort to which Ayşe contributed her skills as a cultural anthropologist and archaeologist and it was only with her help that I was able to find and photograph the many different places and people in the book. Besides everything else, Ayşe is an excellent writer with a very keen eye for observation.

“I might add here that on one of my last trips to take photographs for the book in eastern Turkey I was greatly aided by our daughter Han Ariel Salzmann, who, like her mother, is both very observant and has a way of being able to relate to people and write up those experiences in a very creative way.”

“Travels in Search of Turkey’s Jews” has been published by Libra Publishing and is available at major bookstores.