JTA - 11.20.2003

Washington Jewish Week

Mountain Jews keep culture alive 


by Paula Amann, News Editor 

Mention Gorsky, plov and tar to most American Jews, and you'll get a blank look for your trouble. Zaur Gilalov wants to change that. 

The newly elected president of the World Congress of Mountain Jews is eager to talk about the language, festive dish and musical instrument of his people. They number some 150,000 strong and have their roots in the Caucasus region of Azerbaijan going back about 2,000 years. 

"We have a very rich culture, a very old culture and we want you to know about it," said Gilalov, 29, who has also served as vice president of Moscow's Jewish community since 1999. 

The young entrepreneur and communal leader was visiting Washington last week, with Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, chief rabbi of Moscow, and Sergey Kuvshinov, a Mountain Jew who has advised both the chief rabbi and Gilalov's congress. 

The trio met with the National Security Adviser's director of Russian affairs, Tom Graham, in tandem with the staff of NCSJ -- Advocates on behalf of Jews in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic States & Eurasia. 

Their New York stops included meetings with the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, the World Jewish Congress and Jewish National Fund president Ron Lauder. 

They were also hatching plans for a synagogue in New York, which along with Los Angeles, boasts some 5,000-6,000 Mountain Jews. 

Today, the group's world congress also counts members from as far afield as Israel, Canada, Belgium and the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Dagestan and Russia. 

More than 60 percent are thought to live in the Jewish state, where they have their own synagogue at Tirat ha-Carmel, near Haifa. 

But the heart of Mountain Jewish life lies in Kuba, a northern Azerbaijani town where many expatriates have family homes. 

As for the mysterious tongue called Gorsky, spoken by Mountain Jews worldwide, it stems from the Persian language of Farsi. 

"Gorsky is to Farsi as Yiddish is to German and Ladino is to Spanish," said Goldschmidt. 

Plov -- which shows up on plates at Mountain Jewish b'nai mitzvah parties -- consists of rice, beef and garbanzos, a favorite food item that also gets mixed with raisins as a snack. 

As for the tar, this stringed instrument, a distant cousin of the mandolin and ukelele, livens up such celebrations. 

Moscow's Mountain Jews, who number some 15,000, print one of four Gorsky newspapers in the world, and are due to release a new film on their history and plan a music festival for next spring. 

Their heritage remains largely intact, despite their small numbers, because their homeland harbored little anti-Semitism. Even in Soviet times, Gilalov said, Mountain Jews continued to hold religious services in private homes. 

"In Azerbaijan, it was impossible to hide your Jewishness," Gilalov said.