The 30 Jews left in Nagorny Karabakh find themselves trapped in a society which regards them with growing suspicion
For the tiny Jewish community in Nagorny Karabakh, paradise has been lost irretrievably.
During the Soviet period, the Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan enjoyed a reputation as a haven of ethnic and religious tolerance. Thousands of Jews from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus flocked there in a bid to escape the anti-Semitism endemic in Soviet society.
But the aftermath of the six-year war has ushered in a new era of chauvinism and intolerance to non-Armenians living in Nagorny Karabakh. And the Jewish community has dwindled to just 30 people.
Unlike Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kabardino-Balkaria, Dagestan and Chechnya, Armenia and Nagorny Karabakh never had significant Jewish populations.
The Jews of Armenia were made up mainly of Ashkenazis from Eastern Europe whose immigration begins with Russian unification in 1828-1829 and lasts until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The vast majority of Jews who ended up in Nagorny Karabakh came either to escape persecution or to find work or as a result of mixed marriages. Maria Spector Groisman came for all three reasons.
One of several Jewish women living in Martuni, the third largest town in the disputed territory, Groisman and her husband moved from Chernovtsy, Ukraine, in 1967.
"We were persecuted by the peasants, by our classmates and by our teachers," she says. "I remember the mass graves outside Chernovtsy and Kamianets-Podolsky where most of my relatives were massacred during the war."
When Groisman's parents applied to emigrate to Israel in the late 1960s, her father was imprisoned for four years as an enemy of the people.
Says Groisman, "Moving to Karabakh was like a chance to start again, they treated us with respect there." In the 1970s and 1980s, the Groismans lived a relatively open Jewish life. They received regular packages from the Star of David association in Baku and raised their only daughter, Svetlana, to be proud of her heritage.
However, even before the actual fighting reached Martuni, Maria Groisman began to sense the growing wave of nationalism in Nagorny Karabakh.
Her parents - who had emigrated to Haifa in 1977 - telephoned and urged her to join them in Israel. Soon after the phone call, Karabakhi nationalists threatened to have Groisman fired from her job as a telephone operator unless she wrote an article describing the wretched conditions experienced by Soviet Jews in Israel and praising Armenian tolerance. Groisman refused.
Now her grandson, David, 16, is nervous about starting his three-year military service in the army.
"I hide my Jewish identity from people," he says. "People here think Israel helps Azerbaijan and don't like Jews because of that." Now with tensions running high between Yerevan and Baku and rumors of fresh hostilities, David has even more reason to be concerned.
When the war broke out in 1988, Daniel and Svetlana Groisman were living in Shushi, now Nagorny Karabakh's second largest town. Daniel joined the Armenian army and fought from 1990 until the ceasefire in 1994.
Says Svetlana, "My husband helped retake Shushi. So many fled during the war. We aren't even Armenian but we stayed and didn't betray Karabakh. But now people call us Yids."
After the war, the new government paid out compensation to veterans of the conflict but Daniel was denied the benefits awarded to "pure-blooded" Armenians. When the city court confiscated the Groismans' garage in 1998 and gave it to an ethnic Armenian veteran, the family was told, "Only Armenians are full-fledged citizens. You should all leave for Israel!"
A mixed Jewish-Armenian couple, Alexander and Svetlana Peisakhov, lived in Stepanakert where their children, Sergei and Stella, were known as "local prodigies".
However, during four years of fighting, the children's grandparents, Niusia and Gelta Sarkisian, kept them back from school and hid them in the basement. "We would bury the dead at night because the heavy shelling during the day made it too dangerous," said Nuisia Sarkisian. "We were scared because they were not Armenians. We did everything we could to get them out through Baku."
Since 1988, the Jews of the region have been almost entirely isolated from Jewish organisations in Baku and Yerevan as well as Jewish diaspora agencies such as the Joint Distribution Committee which sends humanitarian aid and special foods for the holidays.
The chairwoman of the Jewish Community of Armenia, Rimma Vardjapetian, is sometimes able to find money for the two or three Karabakhis who come to Yerevan to celebrate Purim.
However, while Nagorny Karabakh remains in political purgatory, the Groismans and the Peisakhovs are not officially recognised as citizens of any country and cannot travel any further than Armenia.
Svetlana Groisman comments, "What bothers me is the lack of attention we get as one of the only Jewish families in Karabakh. I want the right to lead a Jewish life here at the very least."
And Maria Groisman adds, "I dream of visiting my grandparents' grave in Haifa but I cannot cross any borders with my passport. No one knows whether we exist or not."
Steve Swerdlow is a human rights monitor for the Union of Councils and the
US State Department's Young Leadership Fellow in the Caucasus, 2000-2001
By Steve Sverdlow in Stepanakert (CRS No. 85, 4-June-01)
With permission from the IWPR Report for Journal of Turkish Weekly
Remembering The Orly Attack
