Pittsburgh stories through photos
Asim Yildirim came in from his evening prayers and pulled out a large calendar. Nearly every square during March was filled with the name of a family or neighbor that his family would host for an iftar meal in their Ross Township home.
In his culture and religion, he explained, inviting guests to dine also welcomes angels and prayers. Last year, the family welcomed two non-Muslim families to their home during Ramadan. This year, they invited 10. “We want to meet more Americans,” Yildirim said.
Yildirim left his home in Istanbul in 2016 after being “declared a terrorist,” he said, by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He was a TV journalist for 26 years. After he tweeted about government corruption, the Turkish president brought legal action against him. Threatened with eight years in prison, he fled. He left straight for Pittsburgh, following a friend who had come here in 2015. “This is destiny,” said Yildirim.
He carried his large media following to the YouTube channel he runs out of his basement. He is also board president of the City of Bridges Foundation, a nonprofit that works to facilitate cross-cultural understanding and support the Turkish-American community.
Yildirim and his wife and sons welcomed a PublicSource photographer for a meal of lentil and lemon soup, meat and rice, salad, yogurt and baklava for dessert. They broke bread and talked soccer; Yildirim’s oldest and youngest sons played in high school, and they like Manchester City. His second son, Arif, leans toward coding, and was just accepted to Pitt.
At left, Asim Yildirim leads his three sons in prayer after their iftar dinner at the family’s home on March 3. At top right, Keif Yildirim serves Turkish tea after dinner. At bottom, Asim Yildirim works in his basement production studio, where he films a daily YouTube series. (Photos by Quinn Glabicki/PublicSource)
Yildirim likened his former city of Istanbul to the City of Bridges. Pittsburgh’s rivers and valleys remind him of a water channel separating Asia and Europe, the Bosphorus. Does Pittsburgh feel like home? “This is my city. … The city is my homeland.”
The Yildirim family’s story was one of many shared throughout the Muslim holy month of Ramadan across communal tables around Pittsburgh. More than a thousand guests joined members of the Peace Islands Institute [PII] and Turkish Cultural Center of Pittsburgh [TCCP] for iftar dinners with various organizations, from the Tree of Life congregation to Duquesne University students. The nightly meal marks the end of each day’s fast, which lasts from sunrise to sunset for the ninth month of the lunar calendar.
During the fast, people abstain from all food, drinks, cigarettes, gum and spousal relations. Muslims believe that fasting brings them closer to God and allows them to focus on worship while encouraging discipline, gratitude and empathy. The fasting cleanses and trains the body and soul to be closer to a manifestation of Divine Mercy. “In our religion, fasting opens the heart directly,” Yildirim said.
“It’s not related to only not eating, it’s related to your whole body,” said Gurkan Colak of the TCCP and PII. The practice includes refraining from speaking unkindly and being cautious about the quality of the media one consumes, explained Colak to an iftar gathering of over 100 people seated in long tables in the lobby of Pittsburgh’s City-County Building. As the sun lowered outside, Colak shared the pillars of Ramadan, including charity and service, with those gathered from across government sectors and the local international Islamic community. The hall echoed with conversation as people traded stories of how fasting was represented in their own faiths — from Catholic practices at Lent to Hindu fasting days — before falling silent for the nightly call to prayer.
“At the end of the day, the core values are always the same: It’s that the way we worship is slightly different,” said Alan Hausman, president of the displaced Tree of Life congregation, as he and other members welcomed TCCP community members for an iftar dinner at Rodef Shalom in Shadyside. The years following the October 2018 attack on their synagogue have taught him a thing or two about joining together with other traditions.
“Tolerance is the wrong word. We tolerate a root canal. No. We accept people,” he explained. “We learn the only thing we don’t accept is bad people. We just accept people for who and what they are. That’s when the bad stuff goes away.”
More than 50 people gathered to break the fast over a kosher meal in the synagogue’s ballroom, opening with Colak and Tree of Life Rabbi Jeffrey Myers drawing lines between the day of fasting for Yom Kippur and Ramadan fasting. Congregants noted both Jewish and Muslim faiths facing east to pray and using the lunar calendar.
“This is what it’s all about,” said Hausman, gesturing to the tables of cross-faith conversation around him. “If you would really pay attention, you would find that the basic prayers are the same when you drill all the way down.”
At the table behind him, Carole Zawatsky, the inaugural CEO of the Tree of Life’s nonprofit arm, traded experiences with 17-year-old Nimet Aysan of TCCP. They exchanged notes on growing up as minorities in America, and talked about what it’s like for Aysan to fast for Ramadan as a senior at Mt. Lebanon High School alongside Zawatsky’s experience keeping kosher as a schoolgirl. Their conversation ended with a hug and with Zawatsky planning to invite Aysan for Shabbat dinner. Earlier that day, Aysan had wondered if she should even attend the event, but now valued the opportunity to talk “with people, I wouldn’t even, I hate to say this, even say hi to on the street.”
“Growing up in a post-911 America, I’ve had a lot of internal conflict about how I should express my religion on a daily basis. It’s been a journey for me. Sometimes I’ll be very expressive, sometimes I’ll be very watered down,” Aysan said. “It leads into all these preconstructed prejudices and beliefs that we have about each other that we might not even notice. These wonderful women thanked me for educating them on Islam, wow. My perspective is valued.”
After years of being hosted by TCCP for iftar dinners, the Tree of Life congregation wanted to host an iftar of their own for the Muslim community this year. The lack of a home synagogue made it more complicated, but come sunset, Myers was breaking bread with a table of nine Muslim men of different ages.
“If you’re going to open a door to me in friendship, I’m going to walk through it,” said Myers. “This sort of building of bridges is something that’s become a core part of who we are. We are more alike than we are different.”
Photojournalists experience the city and the Greater Pittsburgh region in a unique way. They’re regularly sent out on assignments to make portraits, cover protests, document public meetings and envision people and places we talk about in PublicSource stories. But they see so much more. That’s The Glimpse.
Stephanie Strasburg is a photojournalist with PublicSource who can be reached at stephanie@publicsource.org, on Instagram @stephaniestrasburg.
Quinn Glabicki is the environment and climate reporter at PublicSource and a Report for America corps member. He can be reached at quinn@publicsource.org and on Instagram @quinnglabicki.
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