The Ulus Ashkenazi Jewish Cemetery was established in the early 1900s, during the final decades of the Ottoman Empire, in what was then the Arnavutköy neighborhood of Beşiktaş district on Istanbul's European shore. Ashkenazi Jews — those whose ancestors came primarily from Central and Eastern Europe — had been a distinct community within Istanbul's broader Jewish population for generations, separate in liturgical tradition and cultural practice from the much larger Sephardic community whose roots lay in the Iberian Peninsula. This cemetery gave them their own burial ground on the European side of the Bosphorus, a place to mark death according to their own rites.

The neighborhood around the cemetery, once countryside, has long since transformed into one of Istanbul's most fashionable and expensive residential districts. The hillside address that once sat at the city's edge now sits at its prosperous heart. That transformation has had consequences for who can be buried here.

Burial in the Ulus cemetery is not available to all. Because the grounds occupy land in one of the city's most valuable quarters, the donation required for a burial plot is substantial — and not all families can meet it. Those who cannot are transferred to the Kilyos Jewish Cemetery, located roughly 40 kilometers north of the city center near the Black Sea coast. It is a practical arrangement, but it also means that wealth shapes the geography of Jewish death in Istanbul as much as it shapes the geography of Jewish life.

The religious burial services and maintenance of the cemetery are carried out by the Neve Shalom Synagogue Foundation, the same institution whose congregation was targeted in 1986. That the foundation continues this work — caring for the dead of the community, tending the ground, providing the rituals of mourning — is its own kind of statement about persistence.

About 500 meters north along the same street stands the Ulus Sephardi Jewish Cemetery, the burial ground of the much larger Sephardic community. The two cemeteries share a neighborhood, a street, a maintenance foundation, and now, because the Sephardic grounds have become overpopulated, they share space: Sephardic burials now also take place at the Ashkenazi cemetery.

This quiet merging reflects something true about Istanbul's Jewish communities in the modern era. Two communities that once maintained strictly separate institutions — separate synagogues, separate schools, separate cemeteries — now share their burial ground out of practical necessity. The Ashkenazi and Sephardic traditions remain distinct, but the grounds that hold their dead have grown intertwined.

Among those buried in the Ulus Ashkenazi cemetery are Hayati Kamhi, businessman and son of the entrepreneur Jak Kamhi, and Bensiyon Pinto, who served as honorary president of the Turkish Jewish Community. Their graves mark individual lives within a community that has been present in Istanbul for centuries, shaped by the Ottoman welcome extended to Jewish refugees from the Spanish Inquisition in 1492 and sustained through the upheavals of empire, republic, and modernity.

The monument for the victims of the 1986 and 2003 bombings stands among these individual graves — 22 names from Neve Shalom, and six more from the 2003 attacks. The monument does not let visitors separate the history of violence from the history of ordinary life; the dead of both are in the same ground. That is perhaps the most honest kind of memorial: one that insists the murdered belonged to a community, not just to a tragedy.