Tag #123899 - Interview #78792 (Harun Bozo)

Urfa was a small place, so its people were very religious. Jews didn't like to go out too much. They socialized amongst themselves. There was great respect and attachment for the elders. There was no one who didn't go to the synagogue on a Saturday. Nobody ate trefa [treyf]. No milk products would be cooked in pots and pans where meat was cooked. The whole kitchen would be cleaned up a month before Pesah [Pesach]. According to the Jews of Urfa, it is not forbidden to eat rice on Pesah. However, the Sephardim [see Sephardi Jewry] [6] don't eat rice in case something had slipped into the sacks of rice. That's why actually we clean the rice many times over. And for us, it isn't forbidden or a sin to eat it. However, the cooked rice has to be eaten up and not kept for the next day. There was no matsa [matzah] for Pesah in Urfa. We always made matsa at home like we did with our bread. This was to be sure about the ingredients in both the matsa and the bread. We prepared the dough and then went and waited at the baker's for it to bake and then we would bring it back. That's how we had both our matsa and our bread made. In the 1940s we washed our own wheat, then we would rent a mill and make the wheat into flour and then we would distribute that flour to the Jewish families in Urfa, who would then make their own matsa.