A Glimpse into Azerbaijan’s Hidden All-Jewish Town

Even as its future is uncertain, the unique community of ‘Mountain Jews’ of Krasnaya Sloboda, a town in Muslim Azerbaijan, is experiencing a religious revival thanks to Chabad.

From The Times of Israel:

“Not good,” Rabbi Yona Yaakobi says in Hebrew, expressing his distaste while pointing to a grave featuring a statue of a man who died in 1988.

Carved in white marble, the nearly life-size statue of the deceased portrays him staring ahead, cane in hand, flanked by two pots of artificial flowers. Just below, on a black tombstone, is inscribed the man’s name, date of birth and the day he died in Hebrew. But lower it is engraved again much more prominently in Russian.

“All of this is influenced by the Muslims who got it from the Russians,” Yaakobi continues.

Although this particular grave is among the more ostentatious in the three cemeteries of Krasnaya Sloboda, an all-Jewish town in the mountainous north of Azerbaijan, it is surrounded by hundreds of others showing lifelike pictures of the dead in various poses, sometimes bordering on the absurd.

Click here to continue reading at The Times of Israel.