DECEMBER 8 • 2022 | 15

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T

his past month, I had the 
privilege of joining a delegation 
of Canadian journalists on a trip 
to Azerbaijan, a 95% Muslim (mostly 
Shi’a), former Soviet Republic that gained 
independence in 1991. 
Like Israel, it is located in a 
volatile region, sandwiched 
between Christian Armenia 
and Russia, and Muslim 
Turkey and Iran. 
By 1901, Azerbaijan 
was producing half of 
the world’s oil and thus 
attracted Jewish migrants from further 
afield, including Russia and Georgia. 
Unlike other parts of the Russian Empire, 
Jews in Azerbaijan were not restricted to 
usury trades, and at one point comprised 
40% of the capital city of Baku’s doctors 
and 30% of its lawyers. Just before the 
collapse of the Soviet Union, Soviet 
Azerbaijan was home to 40,000 Jews. 

Today its population is approximately 
20,000, 70% of whom are Mountain Jews, 
20% Ashkenazi and 10% Georgian.
The Jews of Azerbaijan firmly side 
with their homeland in the ongoing 
conflict with Armenia, which resulted 
in two bloody wars over a region called 
Nagorno-Karabakh, which Azerbaijan 
recaptured from Armenia in November 
2020. “They’re not Armenians. They’re 
fascists,” proclaimed Arif Shalumov, 
president of the Jewish Association 
of Ganja, the country’s second-largest 
city. He met us at the site of residential 
buildings that were shelled by Armenia 
in October 2020, killing 26 civilians. 
One of the country’s most respected 
national heroes is Albert Agarunov, a Jew 
who died fighting Armenia at the Battle of 
Shusha in 1992. He is buried in Martyr’s 
Lane in Baku, alongside other war heroes 
and innocent civilians, three of whom are 
Jewish, who were killed by the Soviet army 

during a national uprising in 1990.

 Our delegation included a Jewish 
woman from Toronto who was back to 
Azerbaijan for the first time in 25 years. 
She began crying when we reached the 
top of the Gidir Plain, the hill where 
Azerbaijani forces reconquered the city 
of Shusha on Nov. 6, 2020. She compared 
the feeling of Azerbaijanis returning to 
this hill as to what it must have felt like 
for Israelis returning to the Western Wall 
after the Six-Day War.
Unlike Jewish institutions in North 
America and Europe, Jewish schools 
and synagogues in Azerbaijan have 
no security presence. We visited three 
synagogues in Baku, all of which are 
funded by the government, and I felt 
very safe walking through the streets of 
Baku on Friday night wearing a kippah. 
The Azerbaijani government funds 
two Russian language Jewish day 
schools in Baku, which are tuition-free 

Dan Brotman
Special to the 
Jewish News

Rabbi Zamir 
Isayev, 
Georgian 
Synagogue, 
Baku

Nika Jabiyeva, executive director, 
Network of Azerbaijani Canadians; 
Dan Brotman; and Roman Yusufov, 
Deputy Head for Youth Affairs, 
STMEGI, International Charitable 
Fund of Mountain Jews.

Canadian delegation with Israeli Ambassador George Deek, 
minutes prior to Azerbaijan announcing that it would open an 
embassy in Israel.

