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Naim Avigdor Güleryüz was born in 1933 in Istanbul into a Sephardi family whose ancestors originally settled in eastern Thrace after the expulsion from Spain. A graduate of the Istanbul Faculty of Law, he is fluent in Turkish, French, English, and Judeo-Spanish. Güleryüz has served as vice president and, since 2008, president of the Quincentennial Foundation, also known as 500:Yıl Vakfı, a body established in 1989 in Istanbul by a group of Turkish citizens, both Jews and Muslims, to celebrate, with an extended cultural program in Turkey and abroad,…

Jak V. Kamhi has for many years been one of Turkey’s leading industrialists. He is a major figure in the effort to promote friendship for Turkey around the world, as well as reconciliation between Turkey and world Jewry.Born in Istanbul in 1925, Kamhi is a member of the prominent Qimḥī/Qamhi family of Sephardim, which traces its origins back to the expulsion from Spain. Over the years the family has produced a number of rabbis and other influential figures in the Ottoman Jewish community. Kamhi is a graduate of the Saint Michel French Lycée and the Yildiz Technical University in Istanbul…

Ishak Alaton is a member of an old Sephardic family that fled from Spain to the Ottoman Empire in 1492, settling first in Salonica and then in Istanbul, where he was born in 1927. Since his family lacked the means to send him to a university due to financial losses suffered during World War II, Alaton completed his formal education in 1946 at one of Istanbul’s best secondary schools, the Lycée Saint-Michel. From 1951 to 1953 he worked in Sweden as a welding apprentice. In 1954, following his return to Turkey, he joined the late Üzeyir Garih in founding what became Alarko Holding A.S., which he …

Dr. Üzeyir Garih was born to Sephardic parents in Istanbul on June 28, 1929. His forebears had come to Istanbul from Baghdad in 1873. Garih graduated from Istanbul Technical University with an M.A. degree in 1951. He worked for  a time for the Carrier Corporation in Istanbul, specializing in heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning, but in 1954 he and Ishak Alaton entered into a partnership that was eventually to become Alarko Holding, one of the largest enterprises in Turkey, active in six major business sectors—construction contracting, real estate developm…

Harry Ojalvo was born into a Sephardi family in Istanbul on September 23, 1920. His father, Vital Ojalvo, was vice-consul of the United States in Erzurum from 1899 and in Trabzon from 1904, and later was the agent for the United States Lines and American Express as a partner in Turkey’s first professional travel agency, NATTA—the National Turkish Travel Agency. In 1937, the Ojalvo family was given Turkish citizenship by Prime Minister İsmet İnönü and the minister of foreign affairs, Tevfik Rüştü Aras.After serving in the Turkish army during World War II, Harry Ojalvo operated an automo…