Sasha Goluboff

Communities of Mourning: Mountain Jewish Laments in Azerbaijan and on the Internet

Sasha Goluboff - Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Washington and Lee University in Lexington (Virginia, USA). goluboff@wlu.edu

This article explores two sites of Mountain Jewish mourning - Krasnaia Sloboda, the more traditional location of Mountain Jewish customs - and the Mountain Jewish Online Center. Investigating how lamentations expressed in both spaces create Mountain Jewish community, the paper argues that the development of alternative places of lamentation ultimately challenges gender expectations of emotionality and grief work, as well as the texts of mourning themselves.

Keywords: Mountain Jews, Azerbaijan, mourning, gender, emotion.

Перевод выполнен по изданию: Goluboff, Sascha (2008) "Communities of Mourning: Mountain Jewish Laments in Azerbaijan and on the Internet", in Catherine Wanner and Mark D. Steinberg (eds) Religion, Morality, and Community in Post-Soviet Societies. Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Indiana University Press. Translation and publishing rights are provided by Indiana University Press.

Goluboff S. Communities of Mourning: funeral Lamentations of Mountain Jews in the village of Krasnaya Sloboda (Azerbaijan) and on the Internet.Gosudarstvo, religiya, tserkva v Rossii i za rubezhom [State, Religion, Church in Russia and abroad]. 2015. N 3 (33). pp. 31-64.

Goluboff, Sasha (2015) "Communities of Mourning: Mountain Jewish Laments in Azerbaijan and on the Internet", Gosudarstvo, religiia, tserkov' v Rossii i za rubezhom 33(3): 31 - 64.

page 31


I'm beside myself,
Without you, I'll die, I'll die!
My heart will break,
It will break like a golden ring.
I don't know how to live,
How to ease this grief.
I'm defenseless.
So I reached for the poems.
What depressing verses!
And yet I need them so badly.1

DESCRIBING the mourning rites of his native mountain-Jewish village of Krasnaya Sloboda (Azerbaijan), Hananil Abramov notes that, according to Jewish religious law, the death of "loved ones" - "father and mother, brother and sister, son and daughter, husband and wife" - is the most difficult to survive.2 Abramov emphasizes that Jews, and mountain Jews in particular, are experiencing this grief so hard because" for more than two millennia " Jews were subjected to ...undeserved humiliations and oppressions are always persecuted victims, despised and cursed by the surrounding peoples. In the most difficult circumstances, they [Jews] earn the means to support their large families and raise their children, all the while worrying about their fate. And, of course, after that, the death of a close relative is too hard to survive 3.

Abramov cites Frida Yusufova's poem as an example of this phenomenon: "Before us is a Mountain-Jewish woman expressing in verse her grief over the untimely death of her beloved spouse."4. I view Yusufova's Russian-language poem as a literary form of Mountain-Jewish women's lamentations: an oral tradition called girjə in Hebrew-Tat. In Krasnaya Sloboda, Mountain-Jewish men perform funeral rites and recite the Kaddish prayer, while women gather food for the dead.-

1. Abramov Kh. Mountain Jews of Cuba. Haifa, 2003. All translations from Russian and Hebrew-Tat belong to me.

2. Ibid., p. 218.

3. Ibid., p. 219.

4. Ibid.

page 32
to publicly mourn the deceased. Abramov describes how these mourners remember their departed loved ones:

They call out the names of the deceased, listing all their virtues and mentioning their thirst for life, and this causes pain, lamentations and tears, accompanied by" exclamations from the soul " of all the women present: hei voi azar, which means: "O woe!" It is the duty of women to remember the good deeds of all the dead, as well as what they failed to do. Women even recall the evils they suffered in their lives.5
According to Abramov, this lament forms the core of the mourning ritual; its text is inspired by the experience of the Jewish diaspora and corresponds to this experience, seen through the prism of the history of mountain Jews. The mountain Jews consider themselves descendants of the ten tribes that were exiled from the Kingdom of Israel.6 They have been living in the Caucasus since at least the fifth century BC, both in friendly and hostile interaction with the local Muslim population. Called Mountain Jews in Russian and yehudilər in Azerbaijani, they call themselves cuhuro (juhuro) - Jews in their own language - a dialect of Hebrew-Persian, called the Hebrew-Tat language. Many Mountain Jews now live in Israel, Russia, Europe, and the United States. The survival of Krasnaya Sloboda, which has a Jewish population of 3,600, is particularly important, as 65 percent of mountain Jews emigrated from Azerbaijan, which led to the desolation of all other Jewish settlements in the country7.

The mountain Jews of Krasnaya Sloboda demonstrate an example of Jewish traditions related to death and burial, dividing responsibilities into male and female. Men are responsible for performing official functions that require knowledge of Jewish religious texts. Mourning your wives-

5. Abramov Kh. Mountain Jews of Cuba. Haifa, 2003. p. 223.

6. Altshuler, Mordechai (2002) "A History of the Mountain Jews", in Mountain Jews: Customs and Daily Life in the Caucasus, p. 17. Jerusalem: Israel Museum. For information on the controversial history of Mountain Jews, see Goluboff, Sash L. (2004) " Are They Jews or Asians? A Cautionary Tale about Mountain Jews", Slavic Review 63(1): 113 - 140.

7. For more detailed information about the population, see Agarunov M. The Jewish Community of Azerbaijan, October 2010 [http://juhuro.com/pages/English/English_agarun.htm, accessed from 01.01.2008].

page 33
a "small tradition" within and / or parallel to this "big tradition" 8.
The way Abramov conceptualizes the mourning practices of mountain Jews, linking them internally to the losses suffered in the Diaspora, connects mountain Jews with Jewish history. Khachik Tololyan writes that life in the Jewish diaspora "echoed with sorrow" for the lost homeland and "was politically and economically fragile"9. Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin note that Jews are going through "a process of repeated migration and rooting", and as such"Jewish culture has developed a number of absolutely necessary technologies of cultural transformation (such as creating models for commemorating new collective losses, mourning the loss of the Temple...) "10. This discourse defines the proper relationship between the"I" and the "I". and society in the modern world 11. Just as Mark Steinberg notes in his study of the moral poetics of proletarian writers in revolutionary Russia, the ideas of suffering "are almost always connected with the concepts of the Ego and with the moral and spiritual meanings attached to various concepts of the Ego"12. Lamentations of Mountain Jews defines and explores local perceptions of moral behavior at the village and diaspora levels. In this chapter, I look at the way mountain Jews ' mourning practices represent at least two themes: (1) belonging to the Jewish people, and (2) the past, present, and possible future migrations of Mountain Jews in the Diaspora that threaten to destroy Jewish rural life in the Caucasus.

8. Starr Sered, Susan (1992) Women as Ritual Experts: The Religious Lives of Elderly Jewish Women in Jerusalem, p. 6. New York: Oxford University Press. This gender distinction in religious prescriptions relating to the performance of funerary and memorial rituals is common in Judaism. См. Goldberg, Harvey (2003) Jewish Passages: Cycles of Jewish Life. Berkley: University of California Press.

9. Tololyan, Khachig (1996) "Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Movement", Diaspora 5(1): 12.

10. Boyarin, Jonathan and Boyarin, Daniel (2002) Powers of Diaspora: Two Essays on the Relevance of Jewish Culture, p. 11. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

11. For an example of the cardinal meaning of loss for actual experience, see Freud, Sigmund (1953)" Mourning and Melancholia", in Freud, Sigmund Collected Papers, Volume TV. London: Hogarth Press Ltd and Institute of Psycho-Analysis; см. также Kristeva, Julia (1991) Strangers to Ourselves, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

12. Steinberg, Mark D. (2002) Proletarian Imagination: Self, Morality, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910 - 1925, p. 74. Ithaca, NY.: Cornell University Press.

page 34
I also look at how "the discourse of loss and suffering shapes the religious and ethnic identity of today's mountain Jews." 13 Following Brian Axel, I see the diaspora as "a globally mobile category of identification that generates forms of belonging that are global in breadth and at the same time clearly localized in practice. "14 I look at two" sites " of mourning. In Krasnaya Sloboda, a more "traditional" place of localization of mountain Jewish customs, in 2003 and 2004 I studied girjə-women's lamentations in the house and in the cemetery. On the website of the Mountain Jewish Online Center (www.juhuro.com), created in 2001, contains articles dedicated to the memory of some representatives of mountain Jews. I explored how the lamentations presented in these two spaces shape the mountain Jewish community. At the same time, each of the sites forms a different relationship between religion and culture. Finally, the emergence of alternative places of mourning challenges the tenderistic expectations of experiencing and grieving, and is also reflected in the mourning texts themselves.

Location and agency

While researching the lamentations of Mountain Jews in the village and online, I followed Akil Gupta and James Ferguson: they questioned the notion of" culture "as a natural property of a certain people located in space, and that the way to study culture is to"go to the place" 15. Instead of studying "previously given cultural and territorial entities", they suggested studying "the distribution of culture across territories... as complex and by no means unpredictable results of dynamic historical and political processes".16. Peter Metcalf suggests seeing "emerging cultural spikes" in fieldwork sites, which are "always partial and unstable" when placed in transnational and global contexts.-

13. Levi, Andrey (2011) "Center and Diaspora: Jews in Late-Twentieth-Century Morocco", City and Society 13(2): 249.

14. Axel, Brian Keith (2004) "The Context of Diaspora", Cultural Anthropology 19(1): 46.

15. Gupta, Akhil and Ferguson, James (1992) "Beyond 'Culture': Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference", Cultural Anthropology 7(1): 3.

16. Ibid., p. 4.

page 35
ballroom circumstances 17. Thus, my starting point was to explore the ways in which Mountain Jews "construct their own worlds in cultural terms", both online and offline. 18 Wilson and Peterson note that it makes no sense to view "real" and "virtual" communities as completely different forms of social life; instead, we can "explore a continuum of communities, identities, and networks that exist in different forms, from the most cohesive to the most loose, and regardless of the ways in which community members interact." 19.

Let's look at how people create the community of Krasnaya Sloboda and the Mountain Jewish online center through performing duties related to death and mourning. Although mountain Jews refer to the settlement as a place where they develop and "preserve" their customs, they may see other meanings in these practices today, due to the recent cyclical and sometimes constant departures of the inhabitants of the settlement in search of better economic opportunities.20 On the Jewish holiday of Tishaa b'av (known locally as Suruni), Mountain Jews return to Krasnaya Sloboda to visit the graves of their ancestors in memory of the historic destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem, thus combining personal losses with a common misfortune.21 Three weeks later, they visit the homes of relatives or friends in mourning and take part in rites of remembrance for the deceased. After Suruni, 22 weddings are celebrated in the village.

The Mountain Jewish Online Center, whose texts are mostly written in Russian, is an example of an Internet group-

17. Metcalf, Peter (2001) "Global Disjuncture and the 'Sites' of Anthropology", Cultural Anthropology 16(2): 180, 168.

18. Ibid., p. 167.

19. Wilson, Samuel M. and Peterson, Leighton С (2002) "The Anthropology of Online Communities", Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 6.

20. For similar experiences of diasporas in the post-Soviet context, see Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia 41 (N 1 and 2), 2002.

21. Werlbowsky, R. J. Zwi and Wigoder, Geoffrey (1965) The Encyclopedia of Jewish Religion, p. 273. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

22. According to Jewish tradition, it is forbidden to perform weddings during the time that is associated with a tragedy , for example, during the three weeks that make up the culmination of the Ninth Av. Mountain Jews consider these three weeks a time of mourning, and their weddings are celebrated immediately after the Ninth of Av.

page 36
23. The site was founded by Vadim Alkhazov, who lives in the United States. Although it is supported by mountain Jews from all over the world, the main participants are from the United States, Russia, Azerbaijan and Israel. The site reflects the history of Mountain Jews, their music, culture and community news, as well as family photo galleries. The site also provides information about Jewish holidays and commentary on the Torah. The section entitled "Relevant" is dedicated to the veneration of the deceased. Mourning on the Internet, despite mentioning the places of burial of specific people in specific cemeteries, broke the connection between the place and the rite, which can be traced in the village. Like Yusufova's poem, online articles exist separately from events. But the network nature of these girjə compositions allows you to access them repeatedly. I see these texts as new forms of lament that draw on the basic tropes and tender emotions of expressing mourning.

Focusing on death and mourning as factors that encourage people to engage in the world, I use the concept of agency: The grief of loss is understood "as an object of suffering - but also an object of action." 24 Talal Asad describes grief as a personal experience and social attitude. People feel the need to share their physical and emotional suffering, and they need a response that is culturally appropriate and empathetic. Grief as such is a social act. It creates and supports human relationships. While showing interest in how "certain traditions use grief to create a space for moral action connecting this world and the next", 25 Assad adopts a social constructivist view of emotions as "pragmatic acts and communicative performances".26. Like physical pain, crying for the dead is emotive-

23. Wilson, Samuel M. and Peterson, Leighton C. "The Anthropology of Online Communities", p. 6.

24. Asad, Talal (2003) Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam and Modernity, p. 79. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

25. Ibid., p. 91.

26. Cm. Lutz, Catherine A. and Abu-Lughod, Lila (eds) (1990) Language and the Politics of Emotion, p. 11. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

page 37
emotions that are "felt in bodily experience, and not just known, thought, or evaluated" 27.

If we apply Asad's notion of grief as an action to the Mountain-Jewish context, we can explore local "ethnopsychology" in terms of how grief affects the individual. 28 Mourning as a type of religious practice shapes individuals ' emotional lives, both in real life and online. Below, I will look at how Mountain Jewish women try to translate their grief into weeping, "decorated" with tears and violent emotions. They expect other members of the community to respond in kind and feel something similar during the funeral rite. On the Web, girjə texts exist outside of ritual practice. However, in both cases, we can explore the relationship between the mourner and the intended audience, as well as the form that grief takes. Women's lamentations in the village, as well as memorial entries on the site, are actions that constitute mountain-Jewish "communities of sorrow", morally united by a common loss. These lamentations refer to past social injustices and call for proper retribution. They outline the roles of men and women, as well as proper family relationships.

Nevertheless, emotions, like any discursive practice, are social phenomena and as such have "multiple, mobile, and controversial meanings." 29 Therefore, grief is ambiguous and opens up the possibility for individuals to find poetry even in the grim finitude of death. Through girjə, people connect the past, present, and future together, projecting their own grief onto the broader canvas of (Mountain-)Jewish history. The symbol - rich area of mourning provides an opportunity for people in mourning to understand their grief and, perhaps, sometimes act differently than might be expected based on cultural tradition.

27. Leavitt, John (1996) "Meaning and Feeling in the Anthropology of Emotions", American Ethnologist 15(3): 486 - 500.

28. Wellenkamp, Jane C. (1996) "Notions of Grief and Catharsis among the Toraja", American Ethnologist 15(3): 526.

29. Lutz, Catherine A. and Abu-Lughod, Lila (eds) Language and the Politics of Emotion, pp. 10 - 11.

page 38
Krasnaya Sloboda and mourning rites

Krasnaya Sloboda was originally called the Jewish Sloboda. It is located opposite the Muslim city of Cuba, on the opposite bank of the river. The village has been a center of Jewish life since Fatali Khan, ruler of the Kuba Khanate (1758-1789); granted mountain Jews refuge in this place. They settled their lives there as they were used to, naming neighboring communities after the villages they had left behind in Persia and the Caucasus. 31 This type of migration and settlement expansion continued until the mid-19th century, with each community having its own synagogue and its own cemetery plot.32 Over time, the settlement became known as "Caucasian Jerusalem" 33. Many mountain Jews, under the leadership of family heads, have recently emigrated. However, they try to build and maintain their homes in the village so that there is somewhere to return to and where they can live during the Suruni festival and the rest of the summer.

Initially, mountain Jews lived in sakli - two - or three-room buildings made of straw and clay, heated by cow dung. Before the revolution, the mountain Jews of Cuba specialized in the carpet trade, as well as in the cultivation of tobacco and rice.34 In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, two - story brick houses were built in the village: shops were located on the first floor, and living quarters were located on the second floor.35 Some of these homes have survived, although most have been demolished to make way for luxury three-to five-story homes hosting families for the summer. The collapse of the Soviet Union opened up many commercial opportunities for mountain Jews, which greatly transformed the appearance of the village. Permanent construction of new homes by-

30. Dymshits V. Mountain Jews: history, ethnography, culture. Moscow: DAAT, 1999. p. 13.

31. Khaimovich, Boris (2002) "The Characteristic Features of Caucasian Jewish Construction", in Mikdash-Shamailova, L. (ed.) Mountain Jews, p. 65. Jerusalem: Israel Museum.

32. Ibid., p. 65.

33. Altschuler, Mordechai (1990) The Jews of the Eastern Caucasus. The History of the Mountain Jews to the 19th Century, p. 18. BenZvi Institute & Magnes Press.

34. Mikdash-Shamailoa, Liya (2002) "Daily Life in the Caucasus", in Mikdash-Shamailova, L. (ed.) Mountain Jews, p. 128. Jerusalem: Israel Museum.

35. Khaimovich, Boris. "The Characteristic Features", p. 65.

page 39
it has given rise to a sense of inequality among those who cannot afford such innovations.

As a rule, mountain Jews live in large patrilocal families. Wives are usually supervised by their mothers-in-law. The situation in which two brothers and their wives live together happens so often that there is a special term for it: hamboji. Mountain Jewish women know how to observe Kashrut and how to light candles on Shabbat.

Residents of Krasnaya Sloboda speak the "Cuban" dialect of the Hebrew-Tat language. Although a number of Tat publications are published in Israel, most Mountain Jews in the settlement consider Jewish-Tat to be an oral rather than written language that they speak among themselves, particularly at home.36 With the exception of the local intelligentsia, most mountain Jews I spoke to do not refer to their language as "Jewish-Tat" or mention its Persian origins. They believe that they speak cuhuri ("Jewish"), while their Azerbaijani neighbors speak musulmunal (the Hebrew-Tat word for Azerbaijanis). They speak Azerbaijani well, but not all 37 of them know Russian. Those of them who lived in Israel speak Hebrew.

At the beginning of my summer fieldwork, in 2004, I attended the su1a rite of remembrance for a middle - aged man named Merdechai, a rite celebrated on the fortieth day after the death of 38. The man emigrated to New York with his wife and ten children many years ago. But when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he decided to return to his native village, to the graves of his loved ones. His wife, Leah, was against returning and argued that he was too ill to travel, but her husband insisted. At the airport, he sat down on the floor and mourned his imminent departure. Merdechai died during a transplant in Mo-

36. Before starting practical work, I studied Jewish-Tat using two sources: Frameev I. I. Tat. Nalchik, 1991, Agarunov Ya. M., Agarunov M. Ya. Tatsko (evreysko)- Russian dictionary, Moscow: Hebrew University in Moscow, 1997. In this chapter, I transliterate Hebrew-Tat terms according to the rules recommended by Agarunov.

37. I did most of my interviews in Russian. Local women helped me translate my notes of ritual lamentations into Hebrew-Tat. My knowledge of Azerbaijani helped me grasp the meaning of conversations between mountain Jews and their Azerbaijani neighbors.

38. Officially, this ritual is performed on the fortieth day, but in practice it is performed on the thirtieth.

page 40
skve. I met Leah on cylla, and she told me the story over lunch, which followed several hours of women crying and visiting the grave.

That early morning, Leah and at least fifty other Mountain Jewish women sat on the floor of a tiny back room in the house of a relative of Merdechai's. I managed to squeeze into the last remaining space near the door. We sat listening to Isteer, hired to be the chief mourner, standing in the center of the room. She was a tall woman in her early sixties. Wrapped in a large black shawl and wearing a massive gold necklace, she exuded impressive strength and power. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she spoke softly and precisely to one or another of the women in the room, and each sobbed inconsolably in response, rhythmically tapping her open palms on the tops of her thighs. After several hours of mourning, Isteer escorted the women to the buses to view Merdechai's new gravestone in the cemetery, which is located on a hill overlooking the village. The headstone was made of shiny black marble, over six feet high, and on top of it was a life-size carving of Merdechai's face, with the Star of David and the dates of birth and death.

After we returned to the house for a meal, I introduced myself to Isteer and asked her, " How do you do this? How do you make women cry?" She replied that she recounts the history of each woman's family, awakening grief for her departed relatives, in particular for Merdechai. According to Istir, she is able to lead the ritual because she "has experienced a lot of grief... There is no more sister, father, or mother." Istir used the Hebrew-Tat term dərd to refer to her "sorrow." Dərd means " deep, acute and prolonged grief associated with a great and lasting misfortune."39 This notion of grief as something lasting reveals the connection between individual losses and the wandering of mountain Jews; individual suffering also expresses collective losses suffered in the past and, perhaps, coming in the future.

When I then asked the Isteer why mountain Jewish women should moan about the dead, she said:-

39. Wierzbicka, Anna (2004) "Emotion and Culture: Arguing with Martha Nussbaum", Ethos 31(4): 581. Agarunov Ya. M. and Agarunov M. Ya. define gərd as "grief, sorrow, kruchina".

page 41
one hundred: "Tears adorn funerals as dances adorn weddings" 40. Crying is the most appropriate and beautiful reaction. Mountain Jews believe that mourning the deceased, remembering his lifetime behavior and merits successfully perform two tasks. First, it shows respect (in Hebrew-Tat - hyrmət) for the deceased and his orphaned relatives. Secondly, it calms relatives, allowing them to lighten the burden on their soul. The women said they wept at funerals because, after all,"it is the law that a man dies, so we must mourn him." In addition, when I asked the head of the Abramov family, an octogenarian, "What would have happened if the relatives of the deceased had not mourned him?", he first went on to explain how they would have mourned him; when I repeated my question, he replied sharply: "This is indecent. It would be disrespectful to the deceased. Mourning is mourning. It lasts for seven days, after which the men continue to work and the women gather to weep for thirty days."

In Krasnaya Sloboda, Mountain Jews perceive their religious duties as inextricably intertwined with their ethnic identity. They don't talk about how what they're doing relates to Judaism: it's something completely natural for them. According to them, they perform Jewish religious duties because they are mountain Jews. These gender-defined responsibilities are inherent in what characterizes them as people other than their neighbors, Azerbaijani Muslims. Accordingly, weeping at funerals is a moral duty of Mountain Jewish women. They see this duty as stemming from the very nature of women. They argue that women are naturally capable of emotional, accentuated experiences of grief, and this feeling is very important.

40. Mountain Jews ritually and conceptually connect funerals and weddings. Traditionally, the wedding procession accompanies the bodies of unmarried young people in the cemetery. When a man dies at the age of eighty or older and all his children are still alive, relatives eat honey at the funeral so that he will be buried "with sweetness", since he has fulfilled his purpose in life as a father and breadwinner. Before the bride and her husband's family enter the new home, the groom's mother greets her with a plate of honey, into which the bride dips her right hand. Then she lets her mother-in-law and her father-in-law lick her honey-soaked hand, wiping the remnants on the door jamb to ensure a sweet and prosperous life. Mikdash-Shamailoa, Liya (2002) "Daily Life in the Caucasus", p. 102. Finally, the wedding is arranged right after Suruni, when people receive invitations after visiting the cemetery.

page 42
grieving effortlessly causes tears, making women fit for the art of crying 41. I was talking to other members of the Abramov family, and a woman in her late forties told me that crying is a lot for women, because " men are more serious people, they don't know how to express their feelings. They can't cry like women." Her husband agreed, adding, " Men are stronger than women." Therefore, men bury the deceased and say prayers in Hebrew in the house and over the grave. Isteer, on the other hand, assured me that men also cry, but only in the presence of their closest relatives. Sixty-year-old Tirynj, one of the main mourners (girjəsox), explained that during girjə, men sit outside the house and "burn" with the searing heat of grief. When their emotions become unbearable, they sob. "They can beat themselves or tear their beards, but they do it with restraint." Isteer boasted that men shed tears when they accidentally heard her moaning. I myself saw them crying softly at the graves of their close relatives on Suruni Day.

Yet the local terminology of mourning suggests that it is not easy to make women cry. Girjə is an example of what Tambaya calls "disciplined rehearsal of right attitudes"42. In the Kuba dialect of the Hebrew-Tat language, the word girjə denotes mournful chanting proper; it also means a collective act of mourning for the deceased, in which all women participate as in the performance of "official duties". Mountain Jews call the main mourner girjəsox ("the one who creates a lament" or "the one who creates a mournful song"). Through the specific structure of mourning, it creates "a sense of sublime, intense, and indissoluble community." 43 Her words and movements bring individual mourners to tears and fuse their grief into a collective experience of grief appropriate for such an event.

Istir followed this formula during each girjə. She pronounced the name of the deceased, extolled his or her characteristic features.

41. As an Ashkenazi Jew, I was invited as a mourner to these gatherings.

42. Tambiah, S. (1985) Culture, Thought, and Social Action: An Anthropological Perspective, p. 134. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

43. Ibid., p. 145.

page 43
positive features and named the causes of death. This is the final part, sometimes describing the failures of the deceased or his family./ her relatives, had to draw out the sorrowful lamentations of the female members of the family. This explains why the best girjəsox know everything about every person in the village. To capture the commonality of grief, the main mourner ends each story by giving a sign to the mournful lamentations - Voj and Noj44. Isteer explained ," When I cry, in the end, it's the women who give me that power, they're with me. They support me." By taking on the pain of others and connecting it with her own experiences, she takes on a heavy burden, and this choir gives her the strength to continue the ritual.

Girjə unites mourners internally. Only those who have lost a particularly close person (for example, their parents) can attend the ceremony, as the participation of people who have no experience of experiencing such grief can affect the relatives present. Thus, a woman who crosses the threshold of the room where the ceremony is being held already has a heavy loss experience. As a rule, these are married women with children, and they are either related to the deceased (through extensive family ties, both on the paternal and maternal lines), or are neighbors or friends of the mourners.

A good example of how girjə works is the sal ceremony I attended, which was performed in honor of Zahar, a seventy-year-old Mountain Jewish man who died a year earlier. Eastir talked to his widow about how she had nursed him in his last days. Isteer recalled the events, saying, " You made him a special dish, but it didn't help." Then she scolded the deceased as if he were standing in front of her: "You didn't eat. You threw the food away. You said you didn't have an appetite." Eastir turned to the other widow, detailing how her husband had become terminally ill after building their house. "He didn't have a chance to feed and raise his own children... He built his own house, but he never lived in it." Then Istyr began a mournful chorus. The women slapped their thighs and cheeks. Istyr did her best to emphasize the similarity of the two widows ' fates - both had husbands who died

44. Some women have told me that Voj and Noj are meaningless sounds. Others say they are untranslatable expressions of despair. Agarunov Y. M. and Agarunov M. Y. define Voj as " ah! Oh! Ugh! (expressions of pain, grief)".

page 44
before they could do their duty as fathers. She turned their personal grief into a common misery: it is extremely difficult for any mother and her children to lose a male breadwinner.45
In such cases, Istir reinforced the notion of appropriate male or female behavior, referring to the tragic situation when these goals cannot be achieved. By expressing their grief along with Hysteria at this point, the women showed that they agreed with her feelings. In both everyday and ritual contexts, mountain Jews have repeatedly told me that men build homes and earn money to keep their children fed, while women strive to provide comfort and care. For example, Dovid, a prominent middle-aged Mountain Jewish businessman, described himself as a model of Mountain Jewish male behavior. He did not allow his wife to work, although she has a degree in medicine, because she had to work at home. In a private conversation, his wife Hannah told me that it wasn't easy for her to leave her career, but "when your husband talks, you listen to him, even if you don't agree. You keep your mouth shut. You do what he tells you to do. The husband is the head of the family." She told me this as a piece of advice, thinking that such behavior is the key to a successful marriage.

Dovid and Hanna claimed that a woman working outside the home is "unclean". Many Mountain Jewish men said they supported a man's right to put his wife out on the street if she didn't take care of herself - literally, "let her look bad" - or did questionable things like walking alone or having fun with men outside of her family. Thus, to mourn a deceased woman, calling her" pure " - tovtov or təmiz in Hebrew-Tat, means to recognize that she masterfully coped with the household, taking care of herself and her children. 46 Women know that their actions will be evaluated after death. For example, the accepted phrase that girjəsox utters when referring to wives-

45. According to mountain Jewish women, men in the village do not marry women with children from previous marriages. Thus, if a woman decides to leave her husband, she must be able to live independently or leave the village to find a new husband.

46. The concepts of purity and chastity refer to the ideas of honor and shame accepted in Mountain Jewish society. See Goluboff, Sascha L. (2007) Wicked Woman: Mountain Jewish Folklore, Gossip and Female Agency, unpublished manuscript.

page 45
a person grieving for the loss of an aunt sounds like Qodoj xoləty tovtovini tdsimma (We remember your righteous - "pure" - aunt). A similar attitude can also be seen on tombstone inscriptions. Walking through the cemetery, I came across an epitaph that read::

My mother, my mother,
You gave birth to many children,
My pure mother.

While extolling the virtues of proper motherhood, mourning rites highlight the moral responsibilities of women and men in Mountain Jewish society.

While trying to delve deeper into the concept of "grief "in a conversation with Tırınc, I heard her say:" Those who have not experienced grief (dərd) cannot cry. The words girjəsox only affect those who have lost a brother, sister, or parents." For example, Istir told me that when she laments about a woman's departed brother, she begins the rite with the phrase Qodoj biror təsinəmə. She explained, " Let's say your wonderful and noble brother died. I'm beyond sad that a man like your brother died because my siblings are dead too, right? It's like I'm likening your pain to mine." For other Mountain Jewish women, Qodoj biror təsinəmə means " Your brother (biror) is in my heart (təsinəmə)". The woman, in turn, whispers softly to Isteer: "Təsinəmə" ("I keep him / her in my heart"). Lyuba, a woman in her thirties, described this part of the ritual as "gratitude" to girjəsox for "the kind words she said about your deceased relatives."

The meaning of the word təsinəmə goes back to the heart, soul, or chest. This concept is acutely felt during the first days of mourning, when women beat and scratch their breasts as a sign of suffering-an example of how emotions are experienced and expressed through the body. Taking the etymology a step further, the word qodoj implies that "your pain engulfs me", thus linking memory with suffering. Indeed, Isteer told me that she begins each ritual with the phrase pa dobugil bosit, which means " Don't be offended by the way I cry. There are mothers without sons, sisters without brothers. Our sorrow is your sorrow. I share your grief in half with mine." There is a Jewish-Tat jezreh corresponding to this concept-

page 46
meaning: Dərdjureə vokurdə, which translates as " to speak openly with another about your grief; to share your pain with someone else."

The main mourner's task is to talk to women about their personal grief (dyndyrmis soxdə). When I asked Tırınc how dərd (grief) affects a person, she said: "It suppresses the individual, both morally and spiritually." Accordingly, many women who are severely affected by grief are not able to participate in the crying ritual properly. Older women who are able to " express themselves "("speak out") and "speak beautifully" help these unfortunate people in grief to ease their grief through crying. Isteer boasted to me how "tears flow like rain" when she poetically describes women's bereavements. "I speak and then adorn [their suffering with beautiful words]. And so they cry. Every time I talk about the death of one person, the other person experiences similar grief, and then I see three or four women crying." She continued: "You have to infect grief so that people cry. This is a good deed for the one who has died and for his wife, because it calms her soul." That is why mountain Jews use the expression dərd kesir ("to knock on the soul") when talking about mourning.

At this moment, the main mourner unites women in a community of grief with bitter memories of the deceased. Combining the living and the dead, women remember the actions of the deceased. Later in the conversation, Lyuba echoed Istyr's words: "Whether [women] want to cry or not, they cry. Their hearts tighten. The tears flow by themselves. It's as if the deceased is standing right in front of them. It is as if a dead man has risen from the grave, while the women listen to the speeches of girjəsox. They cry because girjəsox's beautiful speeches hurt them."

To provoke the expression of this pain, the main mourner tries to force women to relive difficult moments. It evokes individual memories to make them collective. Such calls sometimes appeal to local perceptions of social justice, describing what happens when women fail the community's expectations. During one of the ceremonies, girjə Istir addressed two women in the room - Howo and her daughter-in-law Sonia. Isteer explained how Sona refused to help Howo's daughter Dina. Dina called Sonu in the dead of night, complaining of chest pains, saying that she had to go to the hospital. Eastir reminded the women that Sona had told Dinah to wait until morning. However, by then

page 47
Dina died of a heart attack. Her children found her lying face down on the living room floor. A year later, Sonin's son Isif died in Moscow from a drug overdose, and his body was buried in Krasnaya Sloboda. Eastir looked at Howo, adding: "We mourned for Dinah, and then we mourned for Isif. Blood was shed from that tribulation." Eastir turned her gaze to Sona and said:: "You caused bloodshed. Blood gushed from this torn place, " recalling how close relatives of the deceased scratched their cheeks, chest and hands with their nails. Sona and Howo burst into loud sobs, slapping their thighs and chests in a fit of grief caused by the memory of those difficult days.

Grief as a form of action can be a carrier of a complex and sometimes contradictory experience of catharsis and reproach at the same time. This is how the religious practice of girjə is interwoven into a complex relationship with time. The main mourner encourages women to relive their grief in order to vent and thus satisfy their feelings of grief. In this scenario, grief ends with a ritual of crying; this emotion has a beginning and an end.

For example, when I asked Isteer if she could help me transcribe a recording of her ritual, she hesitated and said, " Words follow words; words come of their own accord." What she meant was that it would be difficult for her to remember exactly what she said, so she couldn't (and wouldn't) repeat it (or listen to it on tape). "I don't do it out of time. I just look at the person, and the words come naturally." Tırınc, commenting, also expressed her understanding that words come to girjəsox as inspiration: "During girjə, wherever your gaze is directed, you see the one about whom you are composing [a mournful song]." In fact, although the mountain Jews did not prevent me from recording and photographing the rite, they did not want me to play the recordings at their home, since the mourning has its own time and place. They insisted that women should express their grief exclusively during the ritual of crying. Otherwise, it can absorb them. Lyuba warned me never to bring such notes to the home of a woman aged fifty or older. It would have been as if I had "kicked her in the legs, smashed her by bringing this recording to her house and asking her to listen to it." 47
47. Leah had a video recording of cyla taken at the cemetery, so she could share the event with her children in New York. So not everyone considers it dangerous to play recorded funeral chants in the house.

page 48
Nevertheless, the constant repetition of painful memories during each mourning ceremony gives the participants the impression of permanent grief. Again and again, they must relive their own losses in order to support their relatives. The experience of grief always reasserts the tragic nature of the history and contemporary realities of the (Mountain) Jewish diaspora. In this way, mourning seems to be permanent, because the rituals of mourning are performed many times throughout the year. The feeling of loss, along with Jewish religious holidays, is experienced cyclically. As will be seen below, colossal tombstones reinforce the enduring nature of grief.

Returning home - for funerals and mourning

Death brings the mountain Jews back to Krasnaya Sloboda. Three weeks before Suruni Day, women go from house to house to take part in a girjə for the recently deceased. On Suruni Day, people alone and whole families go through the three cemeteries of the village, looking for the graves of male relatives, and when they find them, women throw up their hands in grief and mourn the deceased, remembering the circumstances of his death. The men kneel before the cold marble stones, sobbing softly.

Cemeteries in Krasnaya Sloboda resemble those found in other mountain-Jewish villages in the Caucasus: Jews live in neighboring communities and bury their dead in nearby hills. 48 The oldest gravestones in Krasnaya Sloboda date from 1807 and 1814 and are carved from rubble stone " approximately eighty centimeters high, with an epitaph carved on the front side plates " 49. At the end of the 19th century, sarcophagi and mausoleums made of solid stone appeared, depicting the same kind of epitaphs in Hebrew, telling about the personality of the deceased and the circumstances of his death.50 Today, the most commonly used black marble slabs are at least six feet high, with a carved image of the deceased's appearance. Sometimes they are made of red marble or in a combination of two materials. Epitaphs are written in Russian, Hebrew, or (much less frequently) in the Hebrew-Tat languages.

48. Khaimovich, Boris. "The Characteristic Features", p. 74.

49. Ibid., p. 75.

50. Ibid., p. 76.

page 49
While visiting the cemetery in the summer of 2004, Moshe, one of the servants of the local synagogue, noticed the graves marked with a metal Star of David on a high pillar. The names written in paint have worn away; these marks are a reminder of the time when mountain Jews were too poor to afford good headstones. He noticed:

There are no relatives left here, otherwise they would have redone it. Twenty years ago, a lot of mountain Jews lived here. Fifty years ago, there were no black marble tombstones: people were afraid to buy them because they might be arrested. If they bought it, the authorities would ask them, " Where did you get all that money?"and" Where do you work"? For this, you could spend seven years in prison. The same thing would have happened if they had bought a good car. Right now, no one is asking questions.

Moshe told them which of the young men buried here had died of illness, which had died in a car accident or from a drug overdose. It was as if we were taking a walk through the city of the dead: the faces from the tombstones seemed to stare at us in silence. Do-weed - the businessman I quoted above-claimed that when a person is killed in an accident, his tombstone shows his face on one side and a full-length life-size portrait on the other. Moshe pointed to a red marble tombstone with a full-size portrait of a man in a Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts. Moshe explained that the man was playing poker in Moscow, lost fifteen thousand dollars, refused to pay them, and was shot. The young man buried nearby was a drug addict, and the man in the grave opposite died of old age.

Undoubtedly, the dead, as well as the living, return here: relatives sometimes decide to move the body of a loved one to Krasnaya Sloboda and bury it here. So it was with Isip (son of Sona) and Merdechai. Returning the deceased to their homeland, people turn the cemetery in Krasnaya Sloboda into a center of mourning, as well as family reunification, precisely during Suruni.

The tears and blood shed by relatives out of grief stain their clothes and water the ground. Tears and blood record the special role that women play in maintaining their health.,

page 50
defining and protecting your community 51. By crying and scratching themselves, they create a community of experience, as the death of one member of the community causes grief for the loss suffered by each woman. The lot of one becomes the lot of another. This is how relatives, families, and all the inhabitants of the village feel united; crying connects a recently deceased relative with all the village's ancestors.

On Suruni Day in the summer of 2004, I took a taxi to the first cemetery with Shushen, her late husband's aunt Mozol, and other relatives. We made our way through the crowds of mourners to three inconspicuous graves. Benami (Shushen's husband and nephew Mozol), Donil (Benami's father) and Milko (Benami's mother and sister Mozol) were buried there. We scattered red carnations on the earthen mounds, while Corn knelt in front of one of them, her face buried in the mud. Then she sat down, her face streaked with dirt and tears, and began to sing her own mournful song.:

Oh, Mother, grief.
Oh, Milko, [who died] in misery...[like] Benami
I took you to the hospital [Milko],
Not knowing that Aunt Frida also suffered and died in this hospital.
Oh, my mother, oh, my aunt.
Oh, my mother, oh, my aunt.

Although Mozol sat near the graves of her sister, brother-in-law, and nephew, she mentioned her mother and aunt, who had experienced similar sufferings in their time. In a memorial lament, the pain of one is an ordeal for the other. Other women stopped to touch the grave and then kiss the hand as a sign of respect for the deceased. Some called Mozol: Tasapet when she was on her knees, and she responded in kind, expressing sympathy for their loss. Later in the conversation, Mozol asked me if I cried when I listened to her mournful song. I answered,

51. The importance of the ritual roles of Mountain Jewish women in shaping community identity is similar to the role of women in the Russian countryside: despite their subordinate status, the status of women was determined by their functions of reproducing and transmitting values to children. See Worobec, Christine D. " Death Ritual among Russian and Ukrainian Peasants; Links between the Living and the Dead", in Stephen P. Frank and Mark D. Steinberg (eds) Cultures in Flux: Lover-Class Values, Practices and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia, pp. 11 - 33. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press.

page 51
for crying. Ignoring my question about how she learned to drive a girjə, she boasted, " I don't know...Everyone came up to me. Did you see it?". On that day, the cemetery was a place of affirmation of Mountain Jewish identity and personal pride.

Taken in a broader context, the mourning ritual can also refer to the losses that a village has suffered as a result of external migration. The community of Sorrows is separate from other places of residence of mountain Jews around the world, but at the same time it is closely connected with them. While movement is an essential aspect of life for mountain Jews, it can come at a price, namely death abroad as a result of what some see as the temptations and dangers of living in foreign cities. In this case, girjə can also be a form of disagreement with men's decisions regarding their families.52
During my first visit to the settlement in February 2003, I attended the funeral of Sonia's son, Isif. Like many other young Mountain Jewish men, he was sent to Moscow to work with a relative. In Moscow, he died of a drug overdose, and the family took the body to Krasnaya Sloboda for burial. On the first day of mourning, relatives gathered at home, and the mother and grandmother conducted a ritual of crying until the arrival of the Istyrs. Dressed in black, Sona held up a large framed portrait of her son. Her face was scratched. Every time she jumped up and down in the middle of the room, she would cross her arms and beat her chest with her fists, repeating: "Hə1əftə, ... Birormə [my son, my brother]."

At one point, Sona turned to me. Leaning down to see my face, she moaned, " He was beautiful, he was kind." I said, " Yes, it was beautiful." "He was always handing out candy to [the kids].".. She looked pleadingly into my eyes. I started to cry. Sona jumped up and fell flat on the ground with a howl. Several young women rushed over to help her

52. См. исследования женских погребальных плачей: Crain, Mary M. (1991) "Poetics and Politics in the Ecuadorian Andes: Women's Narratives of Death and Devil Possession", American Ethnologist 18(1): 67 - 89; Seremetakis, C. Nadia (1991) The Last Word: Women, Death and Divination in Inner Mani. Chicago: Chicago University Press; Hegland, Mary (1998) "Flagellation and Fundamentalism: (Trans)Forming Meaning, Identity, and Gender through Pakistani Women's Rituals of Mourning", American Ethnologist 25(2): 240 - 266; Aggarwal, Ravina (2001) "At the Margins of Death: Ritual Space and the Politics of Location in an Indo-Himalayan Border Village", American Ethnologist 28(3): 549 - 573.

page 52
they got her up and gave her some water. The woman next to me whispered that Sona "won't be able to handle this. She'll kill herself."

Sonya's brother was killed in a road accident when he was running a business in Moscow. In her lament, she joined the fates of both men. As she mourned these losses, she was essentially denouncing the distribution of tender roles in the village, especially how many men were leaving their families behind to earn a living in a foreign land. Her relatives sympathized with her situation, talking about her attempt to heal the pain by suicide, although such actions are usually frowned upon by local and orthodox Jewish traditions.53

A year and a half later, on Suruni Day, some of Sonia's relatives and I visited Isif's grave. Sona and the women were gathered around a full-length portrait of him. She prostrated herself on the ground, her hands outstretched toward the portrait. Mourners wailed that he had died before he could marry. My relatives told me that Sona had cried so much in the last year that her vision had deteriorated.

Mourning rituals in the village form ideas about proper female behavior and emotionality. Lamentations (wailing rituals) generate empathy, strengthening kinship ties between women in the face of the growing mountain-Jewish diaspora. Even though Sona challenged the tender ideology by expressing feelings that run counter to cultural expectations, her emotional outbursts eventually reinforced the notion of mourning as a female occupation.54 However, mourning texts on the Internet challenge the "natural" connection between women, death rites, and mourning rituals that is so clearly visible in village life. Since the Internet is somewhat distanced from everyday sociality, posting texts provides mountain Jews with an opportunity to question cultural practices in a way that would not be possible in rural reality.

53. For more details on Jewish prescriptions against suicide, see Rabinowitz, L., Cohn, H. and Elon, M. (2007) "Suicide", in Encyclopedia Judaica, Vol. 19, pp. 295 - 297. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA.

54. For more on how lamentations both limit and elevate the role of Mountain Jewish women, see Goluboff, Sascha L. (2008)" Patriarchy through Lamentation in Azerbaijan", American Ethnologist 35(1): 81-94.

page 53
"Essays" girjə

The texts of the lamentations in Krasnaya Sloboda are inextricably linked with their performance during funeral rites. However, the text can be separated from this temporal reference to the ritual. Isteer herself hinted at this possibility when I met with her to discuss some of the issues that had arisen since the recording of our first interview. She began our conversation by comparing girjə to a school essay: "This is something you ask your students to write." I said, " Can it also be compared to poetry?" "Yes, quite. You can say that too."

Based on Istir's comments and the fact that there is a lament poetry like Yusufova's (see above), we will move on to what can be called "girjə works" - texts that glorify tragically killed people. I will focus on two cycles of lamentations published on the website of the Mountain Jewish Online Center. One is dedicated to Zaur Gilalov, president of the World Congress of Mountain Jews (WCGE), who was assassinated; the other is dedicated to Violeta Khizgiyayeva and Gena Isakov, who were killed in a suicide bombing in Israel. The transition from oral to written form demonstrates the resilience and flexibility of the genre. Although these texts speak of blood, tears, and shared fate, they could potentially transform the girjə and even the very identity of mountain Jews. While they were posted online to reinforce "basic values, practices, and identities," Mountain Jews can also use the Internet to develop a new vision of themselves "as actors on a larger stage." 55 Next, I'll look at how online lamentations call into question the identity of Mountain Jews based on the "natural" associations between ethnicity, gender, and religiosity that we saw above.

Zaur Gilalov. At 29, Gilalov was a successful young businessman who, like his father, supported the cultural and social projects of mountain Jews. In April 2004, he planned to get married, but was shot dead in March on the way out of a Moscow store where he had just ordered a wedding suit. This tragedy was a reflection of another that happened to his father.-

55. Miller, Daniel and Slater, Don (2000) The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach, p. 10, 19. Oxford: Berg.

page 54
tsom, who was killed in Moscow seven years earlier. Both cases remained unsolved, and many believed the murders were linked to the 56 men's businesses. His father was buried in Krasnaya Sloboda, and Zaur was buried in Moscow.

Olga Yusufova's article entitled "Two Similar Fates" tells how Zaur's untimely death resembles the fate of her brother-in-law Yasha 57. Yusufova writes:

I wouldn't have written this if I hadn't seen the grief and horror in my children's eyes when they heard about Zaur's murder.

- Mom, Zaur was killed just like our beloved Yasha! He was so young! And maybe his young bride was also waiting for him on the eve of the wedding?

Yusufova draws a parallel between the funeral and the wedding, which is very noticeable in the life of the village. In the sequel, she tells how she first heard about Yasha's death when she was in Krasnaya Sloboda. On the first day of Passover (April 21, 1996), someone knocked on her door at six in the morning. It was one of Yasha's employees:

He looked at me and said, as if apologizing:

"Yasha was killed.

Terrified, I could only scream, " Oh my God!"

Then she remembers New York, on March 5, 2004, the eve of Purim. She was at work at a local Russian-language newspaper when the phone rang. It was her publisher:

"Good morning." I'll be right there." Zaur was killed.

Terrified, I could only scream, " Oh my God!" I lost all sense of time and unconsciously drew a parallel between these two seemingly similar fates. At that moment, I thought I was hearing the news of Yasha's death again.

56. "Gilalov Shooting: 03/05/2004" [http://www.ncsj.org/AuxPages/030804Gilalov.html, accessed from 01.01.2008].

57. See: http://www.juhuro.com/pages/zaurgilalovo3124.html, accessed from 01.01.2008.

page 55
Yusufova's account of how she first heard about the murders of Yasha and Zaur is similar to girjə in Krasnaya Sloboda. She also retells the story based on her own perception. Along the way, she includes Zaur among her relatives, linking the fate of two people: one was a member of her family, the other she saw "only once". Her story alone makes readers cry with her:

It was in December when he [Zaur] was in America. The Synagogue of Mountain Jews opened its doors wide for him... He was responsible not only for his family and loved ones, but also for his people, for the majority... In a very short time, he made a huge contribution to the unification and prosperity of the people of mountain Jews... News of Zaur's murder spread through the mountain Jewish community at lightning speed. People gathered in the synagogue to share their grief. It was hard to come to terms with this bitter loss.

Zaur's demise united mountain Jews into an international community of grief. In Yusufova's story, the New York synagogue became a place of mass murder. Yusufova goes on to say, referring to this practice:

Svetlana Aranovna, who knew Zaur well from his charity work, said with tears in her eyes:: "What a blow that landed on him! He was a bright spark that lit up our world briefly and then left us." The words cut deep into my soul. Those were the same words I said when Yasha was killed. Years have passed, but I cannot recover from this pain - the pain of losing loved ones and loved ones. It is like eternal suffering in the soul of an ecstatic mother... But Zaur continues to live in everyone's heart... And for a long time to come, Zaur's family and friends will represent him under the wedding canopy, as he wanted.

Yusufova highlights how hard Zaur worked to support the identity of mountain Jews outside Krasnaya Sloboda. And his very murder united all the communities of mountain Jews in mourning, making them realize not only their spatial separation, but also the power of crying, which unites them into one family.

A second essay on Zaur, entitled " My God! Why did you leave me?", originally published in " Kavkaz-

page 56
in Israel 58. Its author, Mozol Raphael, admits that she never knew Zaur, but heard about him from her father, who praised his good deeds. She wanted to write and publish a prayer book in Jewish-Tat with the sponsorship of Zaur. The article is constructed as a long lament. Raphael assumes the role of girjəsox, speaking directly to the deceased. It starts like this:

There are no words of comfort to be found in these bitter and sorrowful days. We cry and grieve together with your loved ones, Zaur!.. You wanted to be our protector, the leader of the mountain Jewish people. Isn't that right, Zaur? Forgive us for being powerless to avenge your ruined life. Instead of celebrating Purim, instead of a joyous wedding - the bitterness of our loss, Voj lamentations and tears in our eyes.

Then she asks: "Why can Jewish blood be shed with impunity?" Like the funeral lamentations in Krasnaya Sloboda, it mentions the social injustice associated with the death of a loved one. At the same time, speaking only of his blood and not mentioning the blood shed by relatives in grief, Raphael presents Zaur as the one who holds the identity of mountain Jews: an identity that goes beyond the family and the life of the village. Zaur's death united Mountain Jews into an interethnic community that claimed a significant place in the general Jewish diaspora.

Speaking of how she will grieve, Raphael reinforces the notion of mountain Jews as Jews: "Forgive us that on March 8, International Women's Day, your native women are crying out with the bitterness of an irreparable loss. Forgive us all for not being able to say goodbye to you, visit your home, and comfort your loved ones." Since she, too, cannot express her respect in person, she plans to make a pilgrimage to the holy Jewish city of Tveriyun to visit the graves of "our forefathers": "On Friday, I will light candles in honor of Shabbat and go to the tomb of Rabbi Akiva and pray for you, Zaurchik!" Like Yusufova, Raphael mourns the death of Zaur as a family member, even calling him by a pet name. But Raphael goes further, drawing a link between mourning for Zaur and the formation of an international community of mountain Jews,

58. See: http://www.juhuro.com.pages/l40304_xana.html, accessed from 01.01.2008.

page 57
based on Judaism and the national history of Israel. The place of mourning that she places in Israel seems to her similar to Zaur's grave in Moscow. It connects mountain Jews in Russia with Israeli Jews, equating the fate of Zaur with the fate of the famous Jewish forefathers in their historical homeland.

Raphael continues to make connections between mountain Jews, Jewish history, and Judaism by quoting religious texts, especially Megilat Esther (the Book of Esther) and the Psalms of David, and thereby showing that Zaur's untimely demise caused grief to his family and mountain Jews around the world. Raphael transgresses the gender boundaries of the orthodox religious precepts of Judaism, since it is assumed that only men are allowed to read written religious texts in honor of the deceased. This transformation of the tender foundations of the practice of mourning, as well as the unification of Mountain Jews with Judaism in general, becomes even more noticeable in the articles written by Robert Azariev about Violetta Khizgiyaeva and Gena Isakov.

Violetta Khizgiyaeva and Gena Isakov. Violetta Khizgiyayeva and Gena Isakov, two Mountain Jews living in Hadera, Israel, were killed in a suicide bombing on a bus. Robert Azariev, a resident fellow at the Mountain Jewish Online Center in Brooklyn, wrote two articles about the incident. In"Forty Days of Eternity" 59, Azariev describes his trip to Hadera on the "fortieth day" (i.e. sulə) after the deaths of Khizgiyayeva and Isakov:

Here everyone talked about the tragedy, and those who participated in the funeral... they spoke as if their hearts were broken. They talked about Violetta and Gena, and what they hadn't finished yet. They talked about the shock that had gripped everyone, how their bodies had been buried. Faints, sobs, prayers, curses-all this merged into a long, desperate cry-a cry of grief, pain from loss and helplessness."

Azariev notes that "the deaths of these innocent young men shocked the small community of mountain Jews in Israel." The mourners considered it their duty during the forty days of mourning "to be near to ease the grief of their loved ones (as it is written in the Jewish law)." Azariev himself also felt the need

59. See: http://www.juhuro.com/pages/911/055.html, accessed from 01.01.2008.

page 58
visit the graves of young people "to pray for their souls, for all of us, as prayers on the graves of the righteous go straight to G-d." In his interpretation, these mourning practices are related more to Jewish law than to the" tradition " of mountain Jews.

While at the cemetery, Azariev used the website as a place to continue grieving and express feelings of loss and confusion. His lament is written in a tone of moral reflection, pointing out wrongs and calling for retribution.:

Gena's mother doesn't see the point in living without her son... His fifteen-year-old sister sobs bitterly that it would have been better if she had been on that bus, then he would have lived. When I think about all this, I feel like I'm slowly going crazy... It doesn't make sense. Life can end at any time, in any place - maybe on a bus, in a hotel lobby bar, at a disco or in a university cafeteria. This is a tragic, overwhelming realization of the ABSURD.

Unlike the mourners in Krasnaya Sloboda, Azariev expresses the relationship between individual deaths and Jewish national and religious feelings. He writes: "Life is the highest value. God gave it to us as a gift and commanded us to keep and preserve it." Describing his pilgrimage to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, where he asked God to help him understand the tragedies of this world, he draws a symbolic parallel between the tears of the mountain Jews and the tears of the Jewish people. The man at the Wall gave Azariev a Bible that opened to the Second Book of Samuel, 1: 14: "I grieve for you, my brother Jonathan." "These words echoed in my soul: "I grieve for you, my brothers and sisters." As long as the Israeli Government delays resolving the situation, our people will die, and their blood will not be avenged." Azariev definitely believes that the future of Israel is linked to the fate of Gena and Violetta.

Violetta's death touched Azariev most of all. In the article "Thinking Out Loud about It"60, he talks about the enormity of this "terrorist attack" and how the death of Violetta, this beautiful twenty-year-old girl from his hometown of Derbent, affected him personally. Assuming the role of a mourner, he tells,

60. See: http://www.juhuro.com/pages/911/037.html, accessed from 01.01.2008.

page 59
that when he heard about the incident, he "raised his eyes to heaven and whispered the words of prayer." But then, changing the tender roles, he admits that after seeing a photo of Violetta,

...I could barely write, my hands wouldn't move as the treacherous tears rolled down my cheeks and a hard lump formed in my throat... Our Jewish faith says that human souls do not die, that they live in what we call a "better world" where they see everything; that they spend time with us here in a sinful world. I want to talk to Violetta, her immortal soul. Maybe she can hear me..."

And continues:

I read that you tried to be strong and held back your tears after your grandmother died. Whenever I visited the site Juhuro.com and looking at your smiling face, I couldn't hold back the tears. I don't seem to be that strong, but somehow I'm not ashamed of it. It is said that men do not cry, but burn [with the pain of grief]. I do not know what is happening to me, but I feel so terrible. No one will read Kaddish over you, but I will pray for you, so that your soul will become brighter and calmer.

As in the case of Sonya, described above, tears can be a sign of defiance to generally accepted norms. Azariev admits that he can't be as strong in the face of death as Violetta once was. He admires the strength of her spirit and her ability to transcend the norms of gender-related mourning. It is as if he takes on the role of mourner and mourner at the same time, allowing himself to cry and making a vow to recite Kaddish for Violetta. He concludes his text with the promise that on his next trip to Israel, he will visit the cemetery and lay his hand on the tombstone, under which lies "a young Jewish heroine - Violetta Daniilovna Khizgiyaeva."

Conclusion

Mountain Jews construct self-awareness and their attitude to the world through the practice of mourning. They use their experience and grieving discourse to make their lives meaningful. In the village of plachi, family ties are created and strengthened, and on the Internet, these plachis are created and strengthened.-

page 60
chi expands kinship by uniting all Mountain Jews into an interethnic community with the Jewish national State of Israel at its center.

By shedding blood and tears during girjə, Mountain Jewish women take responsibility for creating and strengthening kinship ties that ultimately lead to stronger ties within the village, as opposed to the increasingly supranational nature of mountain Jewish life. Although the display of female emotionality during the crying ritual confirms the idea of women as natural mourners, it also gives each individual woman the ability to express grief in her own way, giving her some freedom of action within the prescribed tender ideology. The performative aspect of girjə determines the amount of grief that women can express, because the genre itself is firmly tied to time and involves improvisation, and women's grief easily turns into an expression of the eternal suffering of the Jewish people and mountain Jews in particular.

Although girjə's online "writings" use village-specific metaphors of blood, tears, and fate, they transform the nature of crying and its expected outcome. The written form is a challenge to traditional ideas about how and where to express grief. The textual nature of these lamentations can disrupt the cyclical and ritualistic nature of mourning, crystallizing it in a format that is accessible to the grieving family at any time. In addition, these "composed" girjəs are written in Russian, which means that mountain Jews see themselves as part of the Russian-Jewish diaspora. Thus, although the authors write for mountain Jews like themselves, their work is accessible to other groups of people. This raises questions about the specific features of the Mountain-Jewish metaphors embedded in the text, and, accordingly, raises doubts about the degree of responsiveness that writers can expect from online readers.

Finally, these new lamentations leave room for men to grieve and cry, too. As a result, grief can go beyond cultural expectations, which can lead to a reduction in the traditionally important role of women in the establishment of Mountain-Jewish kinship. Especially important in this regard is the fact that online articles conceptualize mountain-Jewish identity as transcending family and village boundaries.

Internet authors think of Mountain Jewish identity in a broader context. As a result, online crying creates

page 61
there are new connections between religion and mountain-Jewish culture that are not obvious in the village. Mountain Jews recognize the natural connection between their traditions and Judaism. They identify ethnic and religious identity, because they recognize themselves as Jews in the face of their neighbors-Azerbaijanis (Muslims). But in an international context, Mountain Jews have to prove their religious traditions to other Jewish communities in the Diaspora and in Israel. Religion, not ethnicity, is the main criterion for belonging to the Jewish people. Perhaps this is why Internet authors feel the need to connect their suffering with that of the Jewish people as a whole.61
What is the meaning of a mountain-Jewish identity based on grief and suffering? Apparently, mountain Jews will continue to use the lament genre as a way to experience life's dramas while traveling, both inside and outside the Caucasus. And although the Mountain Jewish online center provides Internet users with the opportunity to get acquainted with other aspects of the life of mountain Jews - weddings, music, history, etc. - death and burial remain the main way of self-identification. Perhaps the need to mourn past losses will help us move on, inspire people to find new meanings that would include the expanding network of family ties in new places and circumstances.

Translated from English by Daria Blinova Bibliography / References

Abramov H. Mountain Jews of Cuba. Haifa, 2003.

Agarunov M. The Jewish Community of Azerbaijan, October 2010 [http://juhuro.com/ pages/English/English_agarun.htm, accessed from 01.01.2008].

Agarunov Ya. M., Agarunov M. Ya. Tatsko (Jewish)- Russian dictionary, Moscow: Hebrew University in Moscow, 1997.

Dymshits V. Mountain Jews: history, ethnography, culture. Moscow: DAAT, 1999.

Frameev I. I. Tat. Nalchik, 1991.

61. For parallels with Muslim network resources, see Eickelman, Dale F. and Anderson, Jon W. (eds) (2003) New Media in Muslim World. Bloomington: Indiana University.

page 62
Abramov, Kh. (2003) Gorskie evrei Kuby [Mountain Jews of Cuba]. Khaifa.

Agarunov, Ia.M., Agarunov M.Ia. (1997) Tatsko(evreisko)-russkii slovar' [Jewish-Russian Dictionary]. M.: Evreiskii universitet v Moskve, 1997.

Agarunov, M. (2010) Evreiskaia obshchina Azerbaidzhana [Jewish Community of Azerbaijan], oktiabr' [http://juhuro.com/pages/English/English_agarun.htm].

Aggarwal, Ravina (2001) "At the Margins of Death: Ritual Space and the Politics of Location in an Indo-Himalayan Border Village", American Ethnologist 28(3).

Altschuler, Mordechai (1990) The Jews of the Eastern Caucasus. The History of the Mountain Jews to the 19th Century. BenZvi Institute & Magnes Press.

Altshuler, Mordechai (2002) "A History of the Mountain Jews", in Mountain Jews: Customs and Daily Life in the Caucasus. Jerusalem: Israel Museum.

Asad, Talal (2003) Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam and Modernity. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Axel, Brian Keith (2004) "The Context of Diaspora", Cultural Anthropology 19(1).

Boyarin, Jonathan and Boyarin, Daniel (2002) Powers of Diaspora: Two Essays on the Relevance of Jewish Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Crain, Mary M. (1991) "Poetics and Politics in the Ecuadorian Andes: Women's Narratives of Death and Devil Possession", American Ethnologist 18(1).

Dymshits, V. (1999) Gorskie evrei: istoriia, etnografiia, kul'tura [Mountain Jews: History, Ethnography, Culture]. M.: DAAT, 1999.

Eickelman, Dale F. and Anderson, Jon W. (eds) (2003) New Media in Muslim World. Bloomington: Indiana University.

Frameev, I.I. (1991) Tat. Nal'chik, 1991.

Freud, Sigmund (1953) "Mourning and Melancholia", in Freud, Sigmund Collected Papers, Volume TV. London: Hogarth Press Ltd and Institute of Psycho-Analysis.

Goldberg, Harvey (2003) Jewish Passages: Cycles of Jewish Life. Berkley: University of California Press.

Goluboff, Sascha L. (2007) Wicked Woman: Mountain Jewish Folklore, Gossip and Female Agency, unpublished manuscript.

Goluboff, Sascha L. (2008) "Patriarchy through Lamentation in Azerbaijan", American Ethnologist 35(1).

Goluboff, Sash L. (2004) "Are They Jews or Asians? A Cautionary Tale about Mountain Jews", Slavic Review 63(1): 113 - 140.

Gupta, Akhil and Ferguson, James (1992) "Beyond 'Culture': Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference", Cultural Anthropology 7(1).

Hegland, Mary (1998) "Flagellation and Fundamentalism: (Trans)Forming Meaning, Identity, and Gender through Pakistani Women's Rituals of Mourning", American Ethnologist 25(2).

Khaimovich, Boris (2002) "The Characteristic Features of Caucasian Jewish Construction", in Mikdash-Shamailova, L. (ed.) Mountain Jews. Jerusalem: Israel Museum.

Kristeva, Julia (1991) Strangers to Ourselves, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

Leavitt, John (1996) "Meaning and Feeling in the Anthropology of Emotions", American Ethnologist 15(3).

Levi, Andrey (2011) "Center and Diaspora: Jews in Late-Twentieth-Century Morocco", City and Society 13(2).

page 63
Lutz, Catherine A. and Abu-Lughod, Lila (eds) (1990) Language and the Politics of Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Metcalf, Peter (2001) "Global Disjuncture and the 'Sites' of Anthropology", Cultural Anthropology 16(2).

Mikdash-Shamailoa, Liya (2002) "Daily Life in the Caucasus", in Mikdash-Shamailova, L. (ed.) Mountain Jews. Jerusalem: Israel Museum.

Miller, Daniel and Slater, Don (2000) The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg.

Rabinowitz, L., Cohn, H. and Elon, M. (2007) "Suicide", in Encyclopaedia Judaica, Vol. 19, pp. 295 - 297. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA.

Seremetakis, C. Nadia (1991) The Last Word: Women, Death and Divination in Inner Mani. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Starr Sered, Susan (1992) Women as Ritual Experts: The Religious Lives of Elderly Jewish Women in Jerusalem. New York: Oxford University Press.

Steinberg, Mark D. (2002) Proletarian Imagination: Self Morality, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910 - 1925. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Tambiah, S. (1985) Culture, Thought, and Social Action: An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Tololyan, Khachig (1996) "Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Movement", Diaspora 5(1).

Wellenkamp, Jane C. (1996) "Notions of Grief and Catharsis among the Toraja", American Ethnologist 15(3).

Werlbowsky, R. J. Zwi and Wigoder, Geoffrey (1965) The Encyclopedia of Jewish Religion. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Wierzbicka, Anna (2004) "Emotion and Culture: Arguing with Martha Nussbaum", Ethos 31(4).

Wilson, Samuel M. and Peterson, Leighton C. (2002) "The Anthropology of Online Communities", Annual Review of Anthropology 31.

Worobec, Christine D. "Death Ritual among Russian and Ukrainian Peasants; Linkages between the Living and the Dead", in Stephen P. Frank and Mark D. Steinberg (eds) Cultures in Flux: Lover-Class Values, Practices and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

page 64

Permanent link to this publication: