by Lee Gancman
KRASNAYA SLOBODA, Azerbaijan –“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.
“I knew all of these people personally. I know the story of each one of them,” Yaakobi laments as he strolls past a large tombstone depicting a middle-aged man in a business suit reclining on a throne-like chair. “This guy for instance went fishing one day, and when he cast his line, it ended up hitting some wires, he got electrocuted and died.”
Rabbi Yaakobi arrived in Krasnaya Sloboda (“Red Village” in Russian) from the central Israeli city of Kfar Saba as a Chabad emissary almost 10 years ago. Since then, he has been working ceaselessly to bring the community back into the fold of Orthodox Judaism after centuries of near isolation from other Jewish communities, as well as decades of Soviet anti-religious policies.
The town itself was founded as a haven for Jews in 1742 by Fatah Ali Khan, the Muslim emir of the town of Quba, located in a relatively flat area just south of the the modern-day border with the Russian province of Dagestan. While the rugged and remote area to the north had served as a haven for Jews for centuries, a period of unrest beginning in the 18th century saw local Sunnis turn on their Jewish counterparts and send them fleeing.
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