Tag #127317 - Interview #97610 (Jak Rutli)

This is how my wife and I met.  I had a friend, Izi Goldenberg who was the owner of Grundig radios and televisions.  He used to manufacture gloves before, gloves for men and women.  He was at Sultanhamam in the five fingers building.  We also founded Rutli-Goldenberg, an agency specializing in hardware but it did not work afterwards.  My current wife was working in a shirt store around there.  When Goldenberg was working on gloves, she came one day to buy a pair and we met there.  I helped her carry the package she bought, we took it to the store.  She was a beautiful woman, “would you date me?”, I said.  “Yes, I will date you”, she said, but not alone.  I had friends, we went out together.  We went out one or two times.  Later we continued.  After a while she started asking about marriage.  I said, “I cannot marry before my sister is married”.  She told this to her mother.  Her mother said, “ask if she has money”.  She came to me and asked, “does your sister have money?”.  I told her that the older brothers that are in the United States and the ones here, they will all give.  She then told me “I know a doctor.  If your sister gets engaged, I will enter your house too, I want to get engaged too”.  I said, “o.k.”   We made a date at a bakery in Beyoğlu, so they could meet.  My older sister came with my older brother, and I with Ceni, and doctor Sami Reytan came alone because he did not have a father or such.  He was a good man, later on he became an internist, they liked each other a lot.  They decided, came to our house, got engaged and later on married.  They got married and we got married.  Following us, my older brother Charles also married.  And my mother lived with my older sister and the doctor.  The Doctor opened a clinic. There was a famous professor Frank here, who ran away from Germany, he was his assistant.  He did his residency with him. He became an internist.  Then he received a very good offer from Israel and went to Israel.  There he became a doctor at Kupat holim (national/public healthcare centers in Israel).  They had children there.  He bought a villa, he bought two flats for his children. His financial situation was good.  My mother went to Israel to be with them.

We were married in Istanbul in the Ashkenazi synagogue at Yüksek Kaldirim with my wife in 1947.  My wife is Sephardic.  I registered her to our community with a paper I took from the Sephardic community to be able to get married.  They have an agreement among themselves, they do not compete.  There is a difference in the way we get married in the synagogue.  Now, when you go to the temple, the groom comes with his mother and father just like the Sephardim, with us, I came with my mother, because there was no father, my older brother took his place.  With us, when the bride comes, she does not enter the temple directly.  She goes up the stairs, there is the first gallery there, she waits.  The rabbi comes, takes me and my mother, we go upstairs.  We open the veil to see that it is my wife. We say “o.k.”.  I go down alone, my mother stays with the bride and they descend together.  And this is why, it is in our history, Rachel for Leah.  This is it.  Because the guy wanted Rachel, they gave him Leah. [Story from the Bible: Yaakov wanted to marry Rahel and had to work for his future father-in-law for seven years to have her hand in marriage. However, on the wedding day, instead of Rahel they put the ugly older sister under the veil and married her off to Yaakov!]

The wedding went very well.  There was no evening party.  We got married, we immediately went home, undressed, changed, took a small suitcase and went immediately to the hotel. We went to Heybeli ada [the third one of the Princess islands, on the Marmara sea, south of Istanbul] for our honeymoon.  We stayed at a hotel there, Halki Palas, it was a nice hotel, the food was very good.  I remember there was a dish where they placed an egg on toast.  An egg over a toast, the yolk in the middle, however they did it, it was fantastic.  We stayed for 3-4 days there.  We were married on August 31st.  Our friends came too.  We went out on a boat.

For the first 3 years of our marriage we lived with my wife’s mother in Altinci Daire. Then we moved to Elmadag.  And we started to live on our own.