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Cigdem Cindy Gokay. (Photo by Cagatay Okutan)

One of New York’s Leading Ladies of Real Estate in New York City

After one of the most turbulent years in recent history, Real Estate Weekly has introduced its 2021 Leading Ladies of Real Estate. Cind Çiğdem Gökay, Head of Sales of Reuveni Real Estate, was recognized as one of the 2021 Leading Ladies of Real Estate by Real Estate Weekly. Gökay's recent work at 30E31 NoMad, Dahlia UWS, Era UWS and years of unmatched experience. After generating over $30 million in new deals at 30E31 (NoMad) and Dahlia (UWS), Cindy was instrumental in the newly unveiled project, Era at 251 W 91st Street featuring 57 residences. Licensed in both New York and New Jersey, she has over a decade of real estate experience. Cindy was introduced to real estate by an industry pioneer and has been thriving ever since. She started off as an assistant, graduated to doing her own deals, and followed through with delivering a 200-plus unit luxury condominium new development project to her firm where she was intimately involved from the rendering phase to building completion. Cindy now oversees sales at Reuveni’s array of new construction projects and is intimately involved with sales planning and management of on-site sales teams.

September 13, 2021
Published in Professionals
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cigdem cindy gokay

An Expert on Commercial Real Estate in New York and Miami

Prior to starting her career in real estate, she was at the United Nations representing World Information Transfer (WIT) in compliance with the Ukrainian Mission focusing on health and sustainable development related to the Chernobyl disaster. She later joined Kushner Companies working for their family office and that was her foray into commercial real estate. Damla spent 8 years at JLL, and joined Colliers International as a Director of Leasing.  Damla graduated from Rutgers University with a Bachelors of Arts degree in Political Science and Philosophy. “It seemed natural after moving to New York City to work in commercial real estate- there’s so much energy in the business and it’s the backbone of the city,” she says. She is the first generation Turkish; her mother is from Izmir and her father is from Kars, and they raised her family in New Jersey.  At a young age Damla’s parents instilled entrepreneurial values; hard work, creativity and staying positive in the face of failure. “These attributes have helped me succeed in my industry,” she adds.

September 13, 2021
Published in Professionals
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A Platinum Agent of New Jersey: İskender Yeşilyurt

When he saw the commercial of the holiday village in Bodrum Torbalı on TV, he decided to continue his career there after his education in tourism and hotel management. He went to Bodrum from Izmir and showed at the hotel door. He told the director he wanted to work there. He did not know anyone. Luckily, he was accepted and started working in the most popular holiday destination in Bodrum in 1985. He continued working there until 1988. One day an American visitor at the hotel asked him if he would like to work on a Norwegian cruise ship. That question opened the door of Iskender Yeşilyurt’s journey to the US. He got on the ship from Rhodes Island in 1990.

September 13, 2021
Published in Professionals
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Kurt Uzbay Is Named to Forbes’ Best-in-State Wealth Advisors List

Forbes has named Kurt Uzbay as financial advisors to its 2021 Best-In-State Wealth Advisors list. This year’s Best-In-State list spotlights more than 5,000 top-performing advisors selected from a pool of 32,725. Advisors were nominated by their firms then researched, interviewed, and assigned rankings within their respective states. Kurt Uzbay of Stifel Financial Corp was selected by Forbes to be included in their coveted 2020 Best-In-State Wealth Advisors List. Stifel Financial Corp. (NYSE: SF) is a financial service holding company headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, that conducts its banking, securities, and financial services business through several wholly owned subsidiaries. Kurt Uzbay answered TURKOFAMERICA’s questions.

September 13, 2021
Published in Success Stories
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Oztekin is at White House with President Reagan.

Muammer A Öztekin, A Master Innovator of the Retail Industry Dies at 95 in Alabama

It’s no exaggeration to say he was one of the fathers of Turkish industrialists in the United States. He was the inventor of adjustable steel shelves that feature uprights with integrated, roll-formed back-panel channels, widely used in the United States and Europe. This revolutionized the retail industry! Muammer Ahmet Öztekin (MAO) was born in Niğde, Turkey on November 10th 1925 to Ahmet Hamdi & Emine Öztekin. His youth was spent in İzmir & İstanbul at which point he came to the USA in 1949 to further his education because the rest of the worlds education systems were still recovering from the war. He first attended the University of Michigan before transferring to the University of Alabama.

September 13, 2021
Published in People
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How to Say Proper Goodbye to a Perfectionist Chef, Orhan Yegen

By Esra Ürkmez - Turkish food world lost its biggest ambassador in America. People who knew Orhan Ağabey will sympathize with me on how hard it is to summarize such a genius, an artist, a perfectionist in few paragraphs, but I will try and do my best as also being his friend and his old-time employee. Chef Orhan, son of a surgeon father, was born in Istanbul, Turkey and raised in Adana. He moved to the United States in 1977 due to growing political turmoil in Turkey at the time. His adventure in the States started with working as a busboy and reached a point where he became an ambassador of Turkish food with the restaurants he opened in New York, Deniz, Bi Lokma, Dervish, Efendi, Francela, Sip Sak, and Lokanta.

September 13, 2021
Published in Restaurants
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Outstanding Turkish American Scientists and Scholars

Turkish-American scientists and scholars have great success and achievements in the last year. Undoubltly, the most successful and known scientists are the husband-and-wife team behind the leading vaccine to solve Covid-19. The German company BioNTech, founded by Dr. Uğur Şahin and Dr. Özlem Türeci, has teamed up with Pfizer on a vaccine that was found to be more than 90 percent effective. Beside Şahin and Türeci, several Turkish-American scientists and scholars also draw attention in the academic circles of the U.S.

September 13, 2021
Published in Academicians
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Emre Hasmet, Evrim Cicek and Nihal Birdir

Unity Bank’s Turkish Team

Unity Bancorp, Inc. Clinton is a 19-branch-bank headquartered in New Jersey. It operates in Bergen, Hunterdon, Middlesex, Somerset, Union, and Warren counties of New Jersey as well as in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania. Three Turkish executives work in the bank, which has total assets of 2 billion dollars. Emre Haşmet, Evrim Çiçek and Nihal Birdir are a gateway to the Turkish-American community at the bank with nearly 200 employees.
Evrim Çiçek, who previously had career experiences at national banks such as PNC and Chase, has been working as the regional manager at the bank since February 2018. Çiçek graduated from The School of Economics, Dumlupinar University in Turkey and had a master's degree in accounting and finance at DeVry University in the US. She worked as deputy branch manager for six years in the Warren, New Jersey branch of JP Morgan Chase, one of the leading banks in America, and worked as a branch manager at PNC Bank between 2014 and 2018. Çiçek joined the Unity Bank family in January 2018 and got promoted to regional manager in May 2020. After gaining experience in big national banks, she considers Unity Bank, which is classified as a community bank, as a warm and friendly environment. "While working in big banks, you do not have much opportunity to use initiative. Here, the customer-banker relationship is more intimate" she says.

September 13, 2021
Published in Professionals
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Turkish American Real Estate Professionals in the US

By Cemil Özyurt - According to TURKOFAMERICA’s research, there are over 500 real estate professionals who have been actively selling and buying homes, renting residential and commercial spaces. The Association of Real Estate License Law Officials (ARELLO) estimates that there are about 2 million active real estate licensees in the United States. There are 106,548 real estate brokerage firms operating as well. Trulia, the real-estate listings and data portal, searched nearly 83,000 agent profiles in the U.S. in 2014 to find the most commonly spoken languages. The most popular, after English, was Spanish at 12.2%, followed by French with 2.5%, Russian, Mandarin and German. About 15% of real-estate agents report speaking a second language, according to the National Association of Realtors. Majority of Turkish-American real estate professionals work in New York, New Jersey, Florida, California, and Texas. There are approximately 250 real estate professionals work in New York, New Jersey and about 100 of them operate in Florida.

September 13, 2021
Published in Professionals
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Ahmet Ertegün's House in Southampton, New York. Known as The Boatman House. It features a two-story living room that is 40 ft. square. In the early 90s, the Erteguns had commissioned architect Jaquelin T. Robertson to design a house for them in Southampton.

Turks Who Own Manhattan's Most Expensive Homes

By Cemil Özyurt – TURKOFAMERICA - Over the past ten years we have seen many foreign buyers claiming their piece of Manhattan, though they were still a small part of the all over Manhattan real estate market. In 2016 Manhattan real estate appraisal company Miller Samuel estimated that foreign buyers made up about 15 percent of all buyers in Manhattan, though for new development, it was higher. Since 2017 there has been a rapid decline in foreign buyers. The strength of the US dollar, the US Treasury Department’s recent mandate of identity disclosure of purchasers, and restrictions on outbound investment by countries like China, and tense political climate between the US and have all effected the perceived attractiveness of Manhattan real estate for foreign buyers. According to a report by Baker McKenzie over all Chinese investment in North America has declined 83% in just two years.

September 13, 2021
Published in Businessman
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Deloitte Acquires Turkish Entrepreneur's Zero Trust Network Access Provider Company TransientX

NEW YORK, July 26, 2021—Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory announced today its acquisition of substantially all the assets of TransientX, Inc., a Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) company based in Hoboken, N.J. The deal adds TransientX’s employees and its unique, dissolvable, cloud-native application networking technology for ZTNA to Deloitte’s existing Zero Trust offerings and solutions. “As organizations modernize their enterprise environments to deal with evolving business models and complex, hyper-connected IT ecosystems, they’re typically shifting from a perimeter-centric approach to the risk-based, Zero Trust approach that enforces the concept of least privilege,” said Andrew Rafla, a Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory Zero Trust leader and principal, Deloitte & Touche LLP. “TransientX’s technology offers the unique capability to embed Zero Trust Network Access into Deloitte’s products and services, differentiating and evolving how we deliver our offerings to our clients — which will lend support to our clients’ Zero Trust adoption efforts as well.”

July 26, 2021
Published in Businessman
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Mark Hall: Most things in the USA regarding FETO have not changed.

Mark Hall: Most things in the USA regarding FETO have not changed.

Turk of America interviewed Mark Hall who is an expert on FETO issues.Mark S Hall is a risk-taking documentary filmmaker and lawyer based in Austin, Texas — whose curiosity and unusual set of skills drive him to tell complex stories for the public good

What has been changed since the July 15th Coup Attempt?

Some things have changed but I believe most things in the USA regarding FETO have not changed. After the 2016 coup attempt. FETO received coverage in the US media and Fethullah Gülen became a figure that was better known to more Americans. Also, certain Gülenist NGO’s shuttered their doors or changed their name. However, in the past 2 years FETO has increased its efforts using American PR firms to regain its foothold as a benign group of esteemed educators who are being persecuted in Turkey for their beliefs. The Gülen charter schools in the USA have seen some failures but are still popular among the educational establishment in certain areas, such as Texas, I believe the Gülen Movement (FETO) emerged from its failed coup attempt in Turkey rather unscathed and are now on the road to expanding their power base in the USA.

Does FETO still expand its charter school network in the U.S?

MSH: Yes, FETO continues to see growth in its charter school network in the USA. Although FETO has seen dramatic failures in Alabama, where two schools were started by Soner Tarim from Texas, other states such as Nevada and New York have not approved applications for new, taxpayer-financed Gülen charter schools there. There is growth but it seems to be slower than before the 2016 coup attempt. And FETO is starting to use a charter services organization to reach into charter schools that are being planned by non-Gülen US citizens. I think this is to cloak their association with the overall FETO cult.

“What would Turkey do better in terms of dealing with FETO in the US? What has Turkey done wrong?”

Although Turkey remains a good friend to the USA, its readily apparent that America has not understood the true nature of FETO or the 2016 coup attempt. I have often thought that bringing a small group of Turkish citizens to the USA who were harmed by the Gülenists or were harmed by the Gülen coup attempt to meet with journalists and political leaders in the USA might have made a difference. It is hard to look into the face of someone who has suffered and not feel that they are honest about their pain. FETO had a 16 years to establish its message through propaganda. It was very difficult for the Turkish government to overcome this advantage after the coup attempt. I also believe that certain missteps by the government of Turkey played into the Gülenist message in power centers (such as Washington, DC) that they were “better” than the democratically elected government there. It will be very difficult to overcome the US media’s bias against the current establishment in Turkey - they have been brainwashed by FETO for many years.

July 18, 2021
Published in Politics
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Turkish Airlines launches flights to the city of Newark, USA

THY launched flights to Newark Liberty International Airport located in the state of New Jersey. THY will fly to Newark four times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays until June 13, 2021. Flights will be scheduled every weekday after June 13, 2021.

Newark, the largest city of the State of New Jersey and one of the closest cities to New York City, will be an alternative transportation line for passengers traveling to New York with the flights initiated by Turkish Airlines.

Passengers will buy a round-trip ticket to Newark with prices starting from $655, including all taxes.

Yahya Üstün (THY Press), Abdülkadir Çay (deputy chief human resources officer), Cenk Öcal (THY New York General Manager), and Reyhan Özgür (New York Consul General) participated in the opening ceremony in the terminal and celebrated the new THY destination.

Newark Liberty Airport :

It is located about 24km southwest of Midtown Manhattan and 97 km northeast of Philadelphia, serving both metropolitan areas. Newark Airport was the first major airport in the United States. Newark Airport, along with JFK and LaGuardia Airports, combine to create the largest airport system in the United States, the 2nd largest in the world in terms of passenger traffic, and largest in the world in terms of total flight operations. In 2019, EWR Airport served 46,336,452 passengers. The word “Liberty” wasn’t added to the airport’s name until 2002. It was added to honor the United Airlines Flight 93 that left from Newark on September 11, 2001 and crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after it was hijacked by terrorists.During WW II, the airport was shut down for commercial use and was instead operated by the U.S. Army Air Corps for logistics operations.Newark Airport is the 3rd-largest hub for United Airlines, after Chicago O’Hare and Houston-Intercontinental airports and it also works as a hub for FedEx Express and United Airlines.There are 30 different airlines that service Newark Airport’s three terminals.There are over 65 restaurants, shops, and kiosks inside of airport terminals.

May 24, 2021

Changing Face of Islam in Germany: Turkish Groups No Longer A Majority

People of Turkish origin no longer make up the majority of Muslims in Germany, a major new report found. The survey of Islamic life in Germany, last carried out in 2016, showed migrants from the Middle East putting their stamp on Germany’s population – one in six of the country’s Muslims now have roots in Syria, Iraq or Lebanon. There are now between 5.3 and 5.6 million Muslims living in Germany, from a population of 83.1 million. The study played down fears of a “parallel society” raised by migrant-sceptic politicians. It found that nearly half of Muslims are German citizens, and most have close friends without any migrant background. More than 80 per cent of Muslims in Germany said they were religious, the study found, but their level of integration hardly differed from other migrant groups.

May 7, 2021
Published in Euro Turks
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