DECEMBER 8 • 2022 | 15
continued on page 16
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.