“I cried when I saw a Shabbat candle lit in a Turkish prison,” said a 78-year-old Jewish-Turkish woman who has lived in California for the last three decades. “It turned my head around because I was thinking it is Friday night in Istanbul, and the Israeli couple accused of spying have to spend the Shabbat in prison. 'Kayadez' is the one Ladino word every Jew in Turkey knows. It means discretion; we are told to keep low-profile by our elders for our own good.”

The Netflix period drama "The Club" has generated a lot of chatter among academics, art lovers, minorities and diaspora. 

Could a Jew or Christian Turk today observe their religion as the heroine Matilda was able to do so in the 1950s? Arie Akkermans, an art critic and a researcher interested in minorities, told Al-Monitor “If you see, for example, the story of this Jewish French guy who was imprisoned in Turkey, you can see treatment is less than kind." To observe Shabbat in public, he said, “would be indeed impossible today. At the same time, today, it would be highly unlikely to find a Jewish person in a Turkish prison. Have rights of minorities regressed over time? Yes, in the sense that they have become vague and near nonexistent, but no in a paradoxical way: At the time, considering the historical circumstances (wealth tax, etc.), minorities were a part of the discourse of the state, but that's not true today.” 

That is why the series was such a loud scream about Jewish-Turkish identity’s visibility. Prominent figures of the Jewish community worked diligently with the actors to speak Ladino well enough to carry dialogues. Jewish customs and traditions, such as kissing a mezuzah when entering a room, were displayed for the first time in a contemporary Turkish show. Indeed, you can also hear English, Greek and Turkish spoken and sung alongside Ladino in the miniseries.