B'nai B'rith IJM - 03.20.2002

 

B'nai B'rith International

Uphill Battle: Mountain Jews Struggle to Maintain Centuries-old Traditions

By Frank Brown

At Moscow's sprawling Izmailovo wholesale market, Oleg Benyaminov works from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. seven days a week, standing in the doorway of a shipping container that serves as a makeshift store.He is his family's sole breadwinner, bringing home about $1,000 a month for his family of six who live with Benyaminov in a rented two bedroom apartment here. The working hours and responsibility weigh heavily on him. "I'm just tired. I want to have days off where I can go for a walk with my wife and kids," said Benyaminov, a broad faced man with an easygoing manner who figures that he's had seven free days over the last four years.

A few containers away on a snowy December day, Benyamin Pisakhov, 51,was presiding over a display of the ladies' and children's shoes he sells. As the owner of two stores, and his own boss, Pisakhov's life is a little easier. But, like Benyaminov, he is biding his time, saving money, mulling whether to leave Moscow with his family of seven. In the coming years, these men's decisions and those of thousands more like them here, may well decide the future of their distinct culture and language.

Both men are Mountain Jews, a Jewish people of not more than 150,000 worldwide who owe their name to the fact that, until recently, they and their ancestors had been living for at least 12 centuries in the mountainous Caucasus region between the Caspian and Black Seas. An estimated 15,000 Mountain Jews, forced in the last decade from their native region by war and poverty, are struggling to maintain their people's traditions in rough-and-tumble Moscow.

As a result, Mountain Jews are enjoying a modest cultural renaissance in the Russian capital, home to three Jewish religious communities, the glossy Minyan magazine, a book-publishing operation, and their own Russian-language Web site. Moscow is an unlikely location given that synagogues here have metal detectors, and dark-complexioned people like the Mountain Jews are reviled.

Perhaps just as unlikely, the engine of this cultural and religious renaissance is the Izmailovo Market, where the rabbi for he market's small synagogue estimates 3,000 Mountain Jewish men work and support thousands more family members. Aside from the synagogue and a makeshift slaughtering operation for kosher meat, the market boasts ten cafés and restaurants featuring the Mountain Jews' distinctive food. One of the more upscale eateries, Sholom Aleichem, was purchased in November by a Russian-born Israeli, Zarach, who asked that his last name not be published. His decision says much about why the Izmailovo Market is fertile ground for Jewish businessmen.

"I've had some experience in Israeli business, in American business. It is easier here. In Israel, the tax burden is such that even a [native] Israeli can't make it. In America, I don't speak the language," said Zarach, a dapper man in a dark pinstriped suit who immigrated to Israel in 1991 with his wife and three children.

Sitting on a couch on the second floor of his two-story restaurant, Zarach answered enigmatically when asked about the specific advantages of Russia's business climate. "Here in Moscow, the bureaucrats help you if you ask them," he said. When asked if he had to pay for this help, Zarach replied, "Nothing happens for free." His tone and manner gave a nod to a widely reputed system of bribes.

Aside from restaurants like Sholom Aleichem, the life of Mountain Jews at the market centers around the modest Izmailovo synagogue, located in a carpeted room measuring 30-feet-by-eight-feet and built into the side of the sports stadium that forms the market's western edge. With no daily prayers or Shabbat services, the synagogue's main function, explained Rabbi Mark Pinkhasov, a Mountain Jew from Derbent, Russia, is to mark the major Jewish holidays and, above all, hold memorial services for the deceased.

The Mountain Jews' dogged commitment to maintaining their unique religious traditions-as they did at some risk during Communist times-led them to create three separate religious communities. Two of them, Rabbi Pinkhasov's included, are concerned primarily with maintaining traditions "as they existed in the Caucasus 50 or 100 years ago," he said. The third, located on the grounds of Moscow's oldest synagogue and built by two brothers whose business empire started at the Izmailovo, is led by a Russian-born Israeli rabbi determined to put Mountain Jews' traditions firmly in line with Orthodox Judaism.

"I want religion, real religion. I don't just want tradition," said Rabbi Zechariah Matatiyagu, a Mountain Jew who moved to Haifa from southern Russian in 1978 at the age of 20 and returned nine years ago to teach.

Although Russian Jewry's overwhelmingly Ashkenazi population is far more secular and assimilated than the country's estimated 40,000 Mountain Jews, Rabbi Matatiyagu finds working with Mountain Jews more difficult. "It is harder with a Mountain Jew  because even if he has the pull to religion, he thinks, 'I am already religious. What more do I need?'," said the rabbi, an engaging man who splits his time between leading the Beit Talkhum congregation in Moscow and pursuing his own religious studies in Israel.

In trying to unravel the roots of modern Mountain Jew religious practice, Rabbi Matatiyagu traveled to Quba, Azerbaijan, the city to which most Mountain Jews can trace their roots. Before the Russian Revolution of 1917, Quba boasted 13 synagogues and was renowned for its Jewish scholarship. Once there, following the fall of the Soviet Union, the rabbi was disappointed: "There was nothing left."

Still, the rabbi can say what-if not why-makes the Mountain Jews different. In reading Hebrew prayers, they use a unique pronunciation drawn from both Sephardic and Ashkenazi sources. They have their own kaddish (prayer for the dead), drawn from ancient Aramaic sources. A death is strictly marked with prayers and a traditional Mountain Jew meal with family and friends on the first through seventh days (shiva), on the 30th day (shloshim), and on every anniversary. The Mountain Jews differ in their degree of observance, the fact that large numbers of family and friends come every one of the seven days. Most distinctively, the rabbi said, each day the women wail or keen in the Mountain Jews' Persian-based language.

"It can go on for hours," he said. "It is not just an ordinary wail; they are telling a story, too, about the person who died, his life, their memories. They wail in such a way that you can't help but cry yourself."

No one knows exactly when the Mountain Jews arrived in the Caucasus region, presumably from Israel via modern Iran. The matter is complicated by the fact that historians must rely on oral accounts because the Mountain Jews only committed their language to writing in the last century under the Soviets. Without any historical evidence, some maintain the Mountain Jews arrived as one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel after the 722 B.C.E. Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom. Some religious Mountain Jews tenaciously hold this belief. Soviet ethnologists asserted that the Mountain Jews were never in Israel: the Mountain Jews weren't originally Jews at all but rather ethnic Persians who converted to Judaism under the Judaic Khazar kingdom which controlled the area from the seventh to the tenth centuries. This view enrages many Mountain Jews, especially those who live in Israel, where they see it as an excuse for some people to treat them as inferior to the Ashkenazim.

Perceived discrimination in Israel is overstated and is largely the result of old people feeling  the bumps of acculturation, says the young leader of the Union of Caucasian Jews in Israel.

"When a person can't make it, he looks for a reason, he looks for a way to explain himself," said Jonatan Mishiev, 33, in a telephone interview from his home in Netanya. He estimates generously that 100,000 Mountain Jews live in Israel. "Arrivals from the Caucasus, both young and old, usually go through a crisis. In the Caucasus, elders are [respected]. If a young person needs help, they go to an elder. In Israel, since they don't speak Hebrew, the old can't help. They must turn to the young."

While the existence of discrimination in Israel is open to debate, it isn't in Moscow. In their physical appearance and often in their accented Russian, Mountain Jews more closely resemble the mostly Muslim peoples of the Caucasus, with whom they lived for centuries in relative peace. In Moscow, that makes them "black" and the target for venal policemen and, most dangerously, the roving gangs of ethnic Russian skinheads and neo-fascists who terrorize and kill. In late October a mob of 300 young men rampaged through an outdoor market in southern Moscow beating dozens of vendors from the Caucasus.

Rabbi Pinkhasov, a well-groomed man in his 30s, gets visibly agitated when the topic turns to the racial abuse endured by his congregants at the market.

"I'll just speak for myself. I have a registration document. I have an apartment. But I never go on foot. I go by car because I'm afraid, literally afraid, that some drunk fool will attack me," the rabbi said, recalling how last summer on Moscow's touristy Old Arbat street he witnessed a gang of ten Russians severely beat three men from the Caucasus.

In some ways, racism and Moscow's police state-inspired requirement that every resident have permission to live here, help keep Mountain Jews from assimilating. Benyaminov, the Izmailovo store clerk, pays $50 every quarter to get a Moscow residency permit through unofficial channels. He doesn't worry about permits for the three adult women in his family because, by Mountain Jew tradition, they don't work outside the home. His father gets by with a document from the synagogue identifying him as a "religious worker."

If the plans of Benyaminov and Pisakhov are any indication, Moscow's Mountain Jew community may well prove to be but a fleeting moment in this people's 2,000-year-old history. Both men said Moscow is a mere transition point, a place to make some money and move on from-to Israel for Pisakhov, to the United States for Benyaminov, who has a sister living in Cleveland.

Pisakhov said he chose Israel over America partly because he wants to help defy the experts, some of whom say that Mountain Jews will disappear within ten years. He hopes that in Israel-where he sees Mountain Jew culture surviving ultimately-his children will marry Mountain Jews.

"We are a little  different than European Jews. We don't like to marry others," said Pisakhov, 51, adding that even when mixed marriages occur, the Mountain Jew side dominates. "Are we scientists? No. But, excuse  me, we don't have any prostitutes.... We respect elders. We raise our children well. We have more positive sides."

Frank Brown is a Moscow-based journalist who writes about religion.