“Welcome to malinke Izrayl, little Israel!”
Those words greeted Harold Zlot when he entered the mayor’s office in Kuba, a tiny Caucasus mountain town in Azerbaijan with 4,000 Jews.
As a board member of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Zlot has visited Jewish communities throughout the former Soviet Union from Siberia in the far north to Azerbaijan, which borders the Mediterranean Sea.
Last month, in Azerbaijan he talked with Jews from Kuba and the neighboring — and much larger — city of Baku.
Kuba, which has lost much of its Jewish population to emigration, was founded more than 1,000 years ago by Jews from Persia. They lived peacefully with their neighbors, developing a language called Tat which is 75 percent Farsi and 25 percent Hebrew and Azeri.
“When we arrived, we started saying `shalom’ to everyone in the street, and they answered back with `shalom,'” Zlot recalled. A completely Jewish town, Kuba uses the Jewish calendar. The Jewish mayor vies for power with the head of the Jewish community.
The town has one functioning synagogue and another that is being renovated to form a community center.
“The community is fairly self-supporting, but they are looking to the Joint to help them set up programs in the new community center,” he said, adding that this is a key mission of the Joint, also known as JDC.
“We provide technical assistance — helping these communities to organize their own programs and Cheseds, welfare societies, so that they can function on their own. We help them to help themselves.”
In Baku, which counts 18,000 Jews among its citizens, Zlot met with several local business leaders to talk about rebuilding the Jewish community.
“There is no history of philanthropy in these towns,” Zlot said, adding that another JDC role is to teach this aspect of tzedakah.
Baku is home to three congregations, with three different approaches to Judaism, based on their members’ heritage. In one building, worshippers are mountain Jews who now live in Baku. In another, Georgian Jews occupy one side and Sephardic Jews the other.
“They call it the condominium synagogue,” Zlot said. “There are two rabbis and two sefer Torahs [scrolls], separated by a wall down the middle of the building.”