Hand & Eye: Fifteen Years of the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize

September 19, 2005–January 8, 2006
Juanita Kreps and Lyndhurst Galleries

Mountain Jews: A Lost Tribe

JASON ESKENAZI AND JENNIFER GOULD KEIL (1999)

The Jews living high in the Caucasus Mountains are believed to have come to the region more than a thousand years ago from what is now Iran. Neither Sephardic nor Ashkenazi in origin, they are called “Mountain Jews.” Isolated for centuries, they retained their religious beliefs and practices, though many of their rabbis were killed in Stalin’s purges. The villages remained closed to the West—part of the Soviets’ “forbidden zones”—until the 1990s. Today the Mountain Jews are clustered around one village, Krasnaya Sloboda, and many of them are now also Israeli citizens, traveling regularly between Israel and Azerbaijan. The import-export business has brought new affluence—but not without trouble. The trade includes narcotics, and prostitution and organized crime are making inroads. Krasnaya Sloboda, having survived communism, now grapples with the profound changes brought about by an influx of wealth and an end to isolation.


PHOTO GALLERY
Photographs by Jason Eskenazi





WRITING

Red Village:Mountains Jews in the Muslim Caucasus
By Jennifer Gould Keil

Picture a village caught between two worlds, three time zones and paradoxes of biblical proportions. Krasnaya Sloboda, or Red Village—is home to the Mountain Jews, who live in the Caucasian foothills of Muslim Azerbaijan. Nobody knows when they arrived or how they got there. And ever since the collapse of communism, they’re not sure where they’re going either.

In 1991 many Mountain Jews—denied the right to travel for the past seventy years—found freedom in Israel, which airlifted Jews out of war-torn regions of the Caucasus, from Chechnya to Georgia and Azerbaijan. But economic hardship brought many Mountain Jews back to Azerbaijan by way of the United States. Now many live between these worlds: their past in post-communist Azerbaijan, their future in the United States, and their spiritual homeland of Israel. And that’s where the post-communist paradoxes begin.

The people of Krasnaya Sloboda mix cultures and centuries as easily as they mix languages. Many speak Russian, Hebrew, Turkish, Farsi, and Tat, their native language that is a sort of Persian Yiddish. Mountain Jews look like their Muslim neighbors. They have the same dark features, and the men wear the same skull caps while the women sport the same colorful shawls across their shoulders or hair, leaving their faces in full view. Only men attend the one remaining synagogue, removing their shoes before entering and sitting on the hand-woven carpets covering the floor, just like their Muslim neighbors in their mosques. They even eat the same food: grilled shashlik, and none of it pork. In both cultures, the women serve the men and eat separately from them. But that’s where the similarities end.

During communism, neighboring Muslim villages flourished while Krasnaya Sloboda languished. Twelve of its thirteen synagogues were destroyed or usurped by Stalin, converted into use as workshops and warehouses. Rabbis were executed or exiled, which also often ended in death. Now Krasnaya Sloboda is undergoing a religious renaissance. Israel sent a rabbi, and charities sponsor young men to study in yeshivas abroad, including one on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

The Mountain Jews benefited from free travel to Israel, which gave them an edge on their Muslim neighbors, many of whom had their life savings wiped out with the collapse of communism and are still struggling to recover. The neighboring Muslim village of Guba, the last stop before Krasnaya Sloboda on the road from Baku, the capital, looks like a ghost town; the odd cow wandering aimlessly across the road. Since 1991, most townspeople have lost their jobs. Almost all of the factories have closed, and state employees, such as doctors and teachers, earn less than ten dollars a month. Most people survive without money on a primitive barter system. It’s clear that the oil wealth of Baku does not leave the capital, except by way of Swiss bank accounts.

But cross the Kuba Bridge, across the river from the dome of the local mosque, and a new era of prosperity begins. Krasnaya Sloboda is still just a one-road mountain village. But it is crammed with Jaguars, Audis, and Mercedes. (“So what if many of the cars have fallen off of German trucks?” says one resident.)

The prosperity comes as the population dwindles. While there were once about 40,000 Mountain Jews in Azerbaijan, in Krasnaya Sloboda and Vartashen, as well as in neighboring Dagestan, many have emigrated or moved to the Azeri capital, Baku. About half of Krasnaya Sloboda’s population, 5,000 residents, emigrated during the 1990s. Yet those who remain are making quite an impact.

Many Mountain Jews have returned from their travels flush with at least some cash from import-export businesses. They use their money in part to build the giant homes that have mushroomed across all regions in the Caucasus, including war-torn Chechnya. But these homes—some without indoor plumbing—have Stars of David built into their exterior design.

Walk through the streets, and the pull of the centuries is tangible. Isolated in the Caucasus, the Mountain Jews have maintained their traditions and may be truer to ancient Jewish ways than most other Jews since the Exodus.

Enter the chai hannahs, or tea houses—off bounds to women—and you will find the men, young and old, gossiping while sipping strong tea and eating hazelnuts plucked from the trees that give them shade. The old men play dominoes.

But look closer, and you will also find men shouting into cell phones, instantly connected to markets, bankers, traders in New York, Tel Aviv, Berlin, Baku, Moscow, Istanbul, and Beijing. Some of the men live in Krasnaya Sloboda all year with their families. But most do not. Some leave their families in Krasnaya Sloboda while they work elsewhere, often as traders, jewelers, and importers and exporters, returning for the summer months. Some families emigrate in entirety to Israel, Canada, and the United States, where they often end up in Queens and Brooklyn, New York. Young boys are sent to yeshivas in Israel and New York. They, too, come back in the summer if they can. Families divided live on different continents, sometimes simultaneously.


The Mountain Jews believe they are one of the ten lost tribes that fled ancient Israel after the destruction of the first temple and then made their way to Azerbaijan via neighboring Iran—and they just might be right. That might explain why one of their biggest holy days of the year is Tisha b’Av, a day of mourning that commemorates the destruction of the first temple, annihilated by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E., and the destruction of the second temple, decimated by the Romans in 70 C.E. It has even come to mark the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, some of whom ended up in Azerbaijan.

Others say they are descendants of the Khazars, indigenous Caucasians who converted to Judaism in the eighth century and ruled the region for more than three hundred years. A similar theory suggests that the Mountain Jews were already firmly established when the first Khazar king to convert to Judaism married a Mountain Jew, and intermarriage between the two ethnic groups then became common.

Still others say they came from Persia a few hundred years ago, as their language is a kind of Farsi-based Persian Yiddish. Their synagogues also face west, the direction from Persia to Jerusalem, instead of south, like other synagogues throughout the former Soviet Union.

Some may also come from Spain, as their language is peppered with Spanish.

As a member of the eternal tribe of the Wandering Jews, I wandered through much of the former Soviet Union and beyond for most of the 1990s. So it was only a matter of time before I ended up in Krasnaya Sloboda, just in time for Tisha b’Av.


They flew in from all over. Berlin, Moscow, New York, Toronto, and Tel Aviv. They have cell phones and U.S. dollars and family and friends who wait for them at the Baku airport. Dwarfed under giant kitsch billboards of cult-of-personality president Heydar Aliev, a career communist during the old regime, they begin the two-and-a-half-hour drive on a dusty, pot-holed road that leads to the mountain foothills and Krasnaya Sloboda, another world they came from and still go to, a crossroads of East and West.

The mountain drive begins in Baku, a classic oil boomtown in the Caucasian backwaters: casinos, carpet shops, luxury hotels, bazaars, construction, poor attempts at European-style fashion boutiques, rows of Mercedes, a few pubs with British names, and the ubiquitous billboards of the democratic dictator (whose son, Adig, happens to run the national oil industry). Yet the real journey starts on the city outskirts, past the Caspian Sea and illegal caviar poachers. En route, by the side of the road: bloody sheep torsos, hanging from trees in the hot sun, waiting for buyers, old women with buckets of red cherries and plums, boys standing by mountains of giant watermelons, men grilling shashlik, tasty barbecue mutton kabobs.

That’s where Morris Nizamo, 38, and the rest of the Mountain Jew convoy stops, for shashlik and vodka, at the side of the road, the Azeri equivalent of a barbecue chicken stand at a Maryland roadside.

Nizamo, who now lives in Toronto and works in Moscow, and his friends are returning for Tisha b’Av—a minor holiday in the West, it is one of the biggest holidays of the year in Krasnaya Sloboda. The entire village walks as one up the hills to its three cemeteries and mourns their dead. (North American Jews tend to do this in September, after Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.)

As the village wanders through the cemeteries, families gather by the graves of their dead and pray. Old women beat their breasts, releasing howls of grief. Grown men cry. Children wander through the sadness, cultivating it and miraculously turning it to joy as they run through the fields, oblivious, impervious to death and what becomes it. The communal grieving process brings people closer, a sort of group catharsis and the release is tangible.

In the late 1990s, an unusual number of parents mourned dead teens and young adults, partly due to the growth of organized crime that grew from the rubble and chaos of what was the former Soviet Union, spreading its tentacles as far as Krasnaya Sloboda.

At the dawn of the millennium, the small village also laments its future. The new post-communist freedom to travel and its corollaries—new wealth, organized crime, and drugs—make this the most perilous time in Mountain Jewish history.


Tisha b’Av also marks the end of a three-week mourning period that forbids weddings and all other festivities. When the mourning period ends, the village lights up. Weddings are booked in two- and three-day ceremonies that include processions, candles, music, and dancing. Although men and women sit separately at weddings, like Orthodox Jews, they dance together—yet another paradox.

Girls still get married young in Krasnaya Sloboda. A thirteen-year-old bride is not uncommon, and many girls are married by fifteen or sixteen to men usually at least ten years older in arranged marriages. Though Krasnaya Sloboda is no longer isolated from the outside world, such traditions remain constant.

Families who emigrate to the United States have different hopes for their children. In New York, young women who were born in Krasnaya Sloboda are expected to get a college education before marriage. Yet when they return to their homeland and attend family weddings, they see nothing unusual about girls marrying at fifteen, though thirteen still seems a little young.

Regina Isakova, a twenty-one-year-old Brooklyn community college student, said her twenty-five-year-old cousin recently got engaged to a thirteen-year-old girl in Krasnaya Sloboda.

“I thought, ‘Wow. She’s still a baby‚’ but my parents didn’t think it was unusual. They’re used to it, though they want me to get my education first. That’s why my parents came here, so we could go to school and be somebody,” Isakova said.

“School ends early there. They have nothing to do but sit home, get engaged, get married, and have babies. It’s all they know. Here it’s a little bit different,” Isakova said.

Ironically, perhaps, the biggest threat to Mountain Jewish life comes from its new freedoms. In the 1990s, young men skipped school to travel and make money, thanks to new Israeli passports. Under communism, the Jews were poor and often worked as household servants for their Muslim neighbors. Now the situation has reversed, and Muslim workers build the large new Jewish homes. But along with the new wealth came an influx of drugs and organized crime. Many young villagers who came of age after the collapse of communism, the twenty-something generation of the 1990s, lost their way.

Today, teenagers seem to have learned from the mistakes of their older siblings. Mountain Jewish youth are back in school, and the social crisis is easing up. The brightest are chosen for Jewish study scholarship programs in Israel and North America. These teens are as comfortable in the tiny village, where old ladies pluck chickens and toss them into fly-swarmed bowls before grilling them, as they are in downtown Manhattan nightclubs, where Mountain Jews and Albanian teenagers sometimes get into fights with local youth gang members. Still the Mountain Jews come back to Krasnaya Sloboda. For many, it is their sanctuary, their hope, and, perhaps, their future.






banner image:

Installation view of Hand & Eye: Fifteen Years of the Lange–Taylor Prize. Photograph by Christoper Sims.


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