SPECIAL REPORT: The race to capture the last images of the Mountain Jews of Azerbaijan

Nick Rosenoer is a character vividly reminiscent of a bygone era. The California drawl untouched by years in London, thick moustache, dark eyes, wavy head of hair often topped by a jaunty Bieber hat (Hasidic style), Tzitzit above his well-worn jeans, a perpetual cigarette dangling at an improbable angle from his lip, his Judaism literally worn on his sleeve as a tattoo artist from Soho. Part Rat-Pack, part rabbinical aficianado. 

It’s only fitting then, that alongside his current work of documenting the lives of the Charedi of Stamford Hill and Canvey Island, together with his 32-year old film-maker sister Sophie Rosenoer, the thirty-six year old has twice flown in and out of Azerbaijan in a desperate race to capture the physical and photographic remnants of the world’s last surviving shtetl.

‘White Apple Red Village’ is a project set within the remote mountains of Northern Azerbaijan. Established around 1742 under the rule of Huseynali Khan, later under Soviet rule, the town was renamed Krasnaya Sloboda (Red Village / Red Town), which corresponds to its Azerbaijani name, Qırmızı Qəsəbə, an apparent reference to the red tiles originally used on the buildings.

The siblings, both born in the Bay Area of California, are united by a profound passion to record the echoes of Jewish life there through photography, video, archival documents and objects recovered from the village, to trace what remains, and what has been lost.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and after Azerbaijan’s independence in 1991, emigration has significantly changed the village. As residents leave in search of opportunities to Brooklyn, New York and Israel, questions emerge about what will remain of its history, traditions, and communal life.

Together Nick and Sophie have gathered mezuzot, siddurs, photographs of Jews serving in the military and combat medals from World War Two.

Says Nick Rosenoer: “We have been trying to professionally conserve them, which is a big process in and of itself. We have everything stabilized to a degree, but I would need real museum level-like archivists to handle some of the rest of the items.”

On his first trip, he couldn’t get his phone to work, “so I pretty much only could communicate through doing charades with people and the few words in Ivrit that I know. Eventually I got a SIM card and was able to use lGoogle Translate, and we developed a relationship.”

Everybody speaks Azerbaijani, and “all the older guys speak Russian because they were forced to learn Russian when it was under Soviet control. And then a lot of people speak Ivrit. Then the local community has its own language, similar to Yiddish, called Juhuri, which is also what they call themselves like. People know them as Mountain Jews, but they would call themselves Juhuri or Kavkazi. They have their own language that only they speak. It’s a mix between Farsi and Hebrew and a little bit of Russian.”

As for the village itself, “there’s nothing really there. No restaurants; I think there might be a hotel. I don’t know that anybody really uses it. The Jewish village is at the bottom of a mountain, and there’s a river on the edge of the town, and then across that river is a larger Muslim village. So I usually stay on the Muslim village side.”

On Nick’s first visit, “I was anxious especially because it’s really, really poor. There are some pockets of wealth, but a lot of the community is really impoverished. But I quickly figured out that the Muslim community, they love the Jews there; they’re close with the Jews there, and they will take care of you if you’re Jewish.

“I’d be walking around and people would say “Yehudi!, Yehudi! Yehudi!”, like Arabic for “Jew”, and I’d come over and we’d have these conversations, and they’ll invite you into their house. They’ll make you food, they’ll make you tea. They’re very cool.”

The remaining Jewish community there are “culturally really distinct, because they were cut off from the rest of the Jewish world for quite a while. So generally, they would consider themselves Mizrahi, and a lot of their influence comes from Iran.”

Nick explains that “when they were doing book trades around the Middle Ages, they were picking up a lot of Sephardi books from Italy and Spain. So they follow that liturgy. Because of Soviet occupation was so oppressive on the culture, they don’t follow any kind of Orthodox tradition, necessarily, in the way that we would totally be familiar with.”

“A lot of the guys have tattoos from serving in Soviet prisons back in the day. You don’t really see anybody wearing Tzitzit. Nobody really wears kepah. They wear the full old-school flat caps, but you’ll see them in the shuls two, three times a day, going to daven and going to service.”

Their rabbi is a “Chabadnick”, a Bukharan Jew that came in about 20 years ago, and provides the community with services. “He just serves like a conduit. They hire out somebody to do the kosher slaughter under their supervision.”

On Tish B’Av, villagers who grew up in the community but have long since left for Israel, Moscow or New York, return, drawn back by the echoes of the past.

They have a “very, very large and really old cemetery, with graves that go back hundreds of years. A lot of the houses are very old; this is a group of Jews that are at risk of extinction.”

Rosenoer adds that on the festival, “They have this tradition of lamenting at the graves; you’ll see hundreds of women pounding on the graves, grabbing, hugging the graves, screaming, crying.”

The sounds “are often in the form of song, mourning the person that died, but also mourning the Temple and and the fact that we haven’t been redeemed to a point where the these family members and friends would be resurrected.”

Nick says. “It was really expensive to immigrate to Israel, so a lot of the families could only leave with what they had on their backs. Some of these homes that are hundreds of years old have been left exactly how they were in 1990 or 1991, when they left after the Soviet Union collapsed.”

This was a time when the Jewish residents “were still able to be visibly Jewish and wear their traditional clothing and practice their original traditions. Then you can see, as the photographs document later on into the Soviet occupation, it became more difficult to remain visibly Jewish in that village.”

He explains: “Things like Jewish weddings where there’s now a hammer and sickle at the bimah; people aren’t wearing their kippahs. The women are not wearing their traditional head wraps. They’re becoming more forcibly secular.”

Rosenoer describes the cache they’ve gathered as “a unique archive of documentation of village life through the decades, all the way up until the 1980s.”

There’s also photographs of Yahrzeit being carried out for Jewish soldiers that died, Israeli documents for aliyah that were filed in the 1970s which is “really unique, because during that period, (the 1970s) the Soviet Union really didn’t want their Jewish population immigrating to Israel and made it virtually impossible to do so.”

There’s also a Torah in a handmade bag and handmade mitpachat, (women’s head wraps) which are “really beautiful. Because women were really poor, every time their scarf ripped, they would repair it with different materials.”

The list of items “just goes on and on, like letters from the front line during various wars; the original Communist flag that flew in the village centre.”

The buildings are “falling in on themselves. They’re completely collapsing and there’s not really a huge effort to preserve most of them” as those who left, carved out successful lives in Brooklyn, New York or Israel, return to knock down the old properties and build new ones.

“Which is just sad,” says Nick “because a lot of the really culturally distinct old homes are disappearing and “whilst they are a really proud culture, there’s not a sense of sentimentality as we would have in the West.”

It was whilst walking around the village during one of his two trips that Nick “happened to pop into one of these abandoned homes where the ceiling had collapsed, the floor had collapsed.

“It’s pretty risky but I found a chest that contained a backpack that was filled with photographs of village life. Hundreds of photographs going all the way back to the early 1900s before the Soviet occupation.”

To Nick, “it made more sense to preserve them and make sure that they survived, then allow them to die in their resting place in that home.

“So,” he adds, “I have this large archive that I brought back, because it had been exposed to the elements under this roof that had collapsed for so many decades that all the photographs are extremely fragile. You just breathe on them wrong and they disintegrate.

Many of the documents are written in Juhuri (a Judeo-Persian language traditionally spoken by the Mountain Jews) and the two are trying to find translators from around the world that grew up in Qrrnzl Qesebe to accurately transcribe them.

Even they struggle to do so accurately, because the Juhuri that’s used in these documents is so antiquated.

Sophie Rosenoer tells Jewish News: “Jewish history is so often told through the lens of loss, and there’s something extraordinary about encountering a place where that history is still being lived. We tend to think of shtetls in the past tense, as worlds that once existed. Qırmızı Qəsəbə offers a rare opportunity to observe one in the present, not as a relic of the past, but as a community whose story continues to evolve.”

She’s fascinated “that we’re not simply looking at what the Mountain Jews endured or preserved, but what they have built and what they continue to become. As a filmmaker, I’m interested in that interplay between past and present, and in documenting a history that hasn’t reached its conclusion.”

She adds that with each visit, “my brother and I delve deeper into the village, its people, and its traditions, discovering things that complicate and challenge our initial impressions. Much like the village itself, the narrative is anything but static and constantly being rewritten.”

They’re grateful for the “support from various residents around the world that have given up some of their time to help me with the documents. We’ve identified some of the family members; I know that this particular family where a lot of these documents come from, owned one of the major tea shops in the village, which is a big meeting place for socializing and village life. So we’ve been able to identify some of the people from the photos but it’s really, really difficult without professional help.”

Whilst they want to digitize and archive what they’ve discovered to use as educational materials, Nick adds that it’s “extraordinarily expensive to properly archive those materials so they don’t deteriorate further.

“So they’re basically all sitting in a big chest in my bedroom, where we’re waiting, trying to get the money together to to do it properly, because otherwise they will continue to deteriorate.”

Their first trip lasted ten days, the second for two weeks. Nick hopes to return next summer as “July is an important time to go back, because while the village is mostly empty throughout the year, aside, from the few residents that still live there, who basically spend all their time in tea shops, smoking cigarettes and playing backgammon.”

Reflecting on the responsibility he and his sister feel to preserve and document what they are discovering, Nick says: “Shtetls occupy a unique space in Jewish memory as not a lot of documentation of shtetl culture survived the Shoah.  What we do have, it’s not always easily discernible between what is fact and fantasy.

“That there is a remaining shtetl that has survived provides a unique opportunity to understand shtetl culture, both historically and their relationship with the present.”

Secondly, he adds, the Jewish media has focused primarily on the experience of Jews in Europe and Israel. Jews like the Juhuri, he says, “that have a long and rich history at the crossroads of the Middle East and Europe have largely been unnoticed and or ignored.

“It’s my hope that I can help tell their story, and bring attention to a Jewish culture that doesn’t necessarily follow our expectations of what Judaism looks like.”

Finally, says Rosenoer, “having suffered decades of cultural erasure during the Soviet period, much of the history of this community is at risk. Through sustained work in Qırmızı Qəsəbə, the project can amplify the voices of the community in order to reassert their own history.”

• To support the project’s archive restoration and ongoing documentary work, click here.