Synagogue of the Jews from the Caucasus

The story

On Hava Street, in the northwest of Beersheba, there is registered in the associations registry of the Ministry of Justice an association by the name "The Synagogue of the Immigrants from the Caucasus in the name of R. Yaakov ben Yitzhak of blessed memory", from 15 January 1996, and its registered purpose is the establishment and running of a synagogue. It is not the first in the city: on 2 September 1984 there was registered in Beersheba the "Association of the Immigrants from the Caucasus for the purpose of building a synagogue", and its registered purpose is one sentence — the building of a synagogue for the immigrants from the Caucasus. And on 25 May 2025 a third association of the same community was registered in the city, a spiritual center of the community of the Jews from the Caucasus, on Toledano Street. The Mountain Jews call themselves Juhuro, which means Jews, and their language is Juhuri — a relatively isolated branch of Judeo-Persian, which developed in the Caucasus. They sat mainly in Dagestan and in Azerbaijan, and beside these in smaller communities in Chechnya, in Kabardino-Balkaria and in North Ossetia. The name their neighbors gave them in Turkish was dağ-çufut, mountain Jew; and from that same word, dağ, mountain, is derived also the name of Dagestan — the land of mountains. The largest immigration from the Caucasus took place in the nineteen-seventies, and a further wave arrived in the nineteen-nineties; at the end of that decade the community in Israel numbered some eighty thousand souls. And among its large concentrations in the country — Acre, Nof HaGalil, Ofakim, Kiryat Gat, Hadera and Sderot — Beersheba too is counted.

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