Azerbaijan’s only JCC sold as community shrinks

BAKU, Azerbaijan — A year after Bella Regimov’s two children left their native country for Israel, along with many of her friends and relatives, she began feeling isolated. In Azerbaijan’s family-oriented society, the 76-year-old was losing “the will to get up in the morning.”

But in 2006, she started volunteering at the Jewish community center that the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, or JDC, had opened two years earlier in this capital city of the Caucasus republic.

“This became my home,” Regimov said of The Jewish House, a crumbling building on a busy street bordering the Baku Railway Station. “I come here first thing in the morning.”

Since she started volunteering, Regimov has come to depend on the center for social interaction, a sense of purpose and even exercise: she walks at least two miles a day to the center and back to her home in Baku’s old Jewish quarter. In the summer, she walks briskly to minimize her exposure to the scorching sun, slowing down only under the shade of buildings.

But this month, Regimov and dozens of other elderly Jews in Baku will have to leave the building. JDC has sold it to streamline expenses in a city with a dwindling Jewish community.

The sale is part of a broader effort by JDC to respond to shifting Jewish community demographics, the New York-based group said. In the case of Baku, whose Jewish population has shrunk from 16,000 to 8,000 since 2000, JDC will move its offices to a smaller space.

Many Azeri Jews have left for Russia and Israel in search of opportunities unavailable in Azerbaijan, an oil-rich, nepotist country where many residents live in abject poverty.

As the community shrinks, Regimov and other elderly Jews lean on the institutions that are their solution to loneliness.

“Please tell them not to take this away from us,” she said. “It’s my reason for getting up in the morning, and I’m not the only one.”

The Jewish House, at 13,000 square feet, includes an auditorium, workshop rooms, classrooms and space for exhibitions. JDC said the new space is about five times smaller, but will have space for activities and a day center for seniors.

Still, Shaul Davidov, who has headed The Jewish House since its opening, called it “the end of an era” for his community.

The organizations that run Jewish activities in Baku will find a new address, he said, but “it means a painful loss” for Regimov and dozens of elderly Jews who come to The Jewish House daily to play cards, participate in arts and crafts lessons and study Hebrew.

“I don’t think they’ll come. It will not be the same,” he said.

Arnold Zeligman, 86, a volunteer Hebrew teacher at The Jewish House, is determined to continue in the new space. “But where will we have concerts? Where will we have a festive kabbalat Shabbat?” he asks. “I don’t see it happening, and it’s a very big shame.”

Annual upkeep costs JDC about $60,000, Davidov said.

Baku has two active synagogues in the old Jewish quarter. Both are small in comparison to The Jewish House and “our people don’t really feel like it’s their space there,” said Zeligman, whose only son lives in Israel.

His students are a dozen or so pensioners. Watching him wrap his tongue around the best Hebrew words in his vocabulary, they crack jokes in Juhuri, a dying Jewish dialect. A mix of Farsi and Hebrew, it is the centuries-old language of Mountain Jews, who are considered neither Sephardic nor Ashkenazi.

Fading and lacking an official alphabet — the few Juhuri books in existence use Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew or Latin — the pensioners’ native tongue is no use for communicating with grandchildren who only speak Hebrew. But none of them is seriously thinking about moving to Israel, Zeligman said.

Michal Frank, the executive director of JDC in the former Soviet Union, said she “understands that it can be upsetting” to some in the community.

“We’re very attentive to their needs, but we need to adjust to demographic shifts and decreasing budgets for the good of all JDC clients,” she said.

In 2017, JDC spent more than $120 million — slightly over one-third of its budget — on supporting Jewish communities in the former Soviet Union, including funding for the Hesed program, which that year supported some 110,000 needy individuals.

JDC has had to direct extra resources to Russia and Ukraine, where most former Soviet Jews live. Since 2013, at least 6,500 Jews have applied for its welfare programs in Ukraine, one of the most dramatic increases since Ukraine gained independence in 1991 and a response to a 2014 financial crisis over territorial conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

These socioeconomic developments coincided with a decrease in JDC’s available cash. The group’s assets dropped from $711 million in 2014 to $644 million last year — a 10% decrease. Expenditures dropped accordingly.

As needs increase elsewhere, they shrink in places like Baku.

At The Jewish House, the number of people receiving services, or clients, declined by half since 2005, according to JDC. There are currently some 900 elderly clients there. Few younger Jews apply for aid.

This pattern is not unique to Baku. Across the former Soviet region, ailing economies and the erosion of democratic standards are prompting many Jews to finally leave.

In the Russian Siberian city of Chelyabinsk, the JDC Hesed office has seen a decrease of 51 percent in the number of its clients from 2004. In Krasnoyarsk, another city in Siberia, a 63 percent decrease in clients since 2004 resulted in JDC merging that city’s operations, servicing its 219 remaining clients, with those of Novosibirsk.

In Belarus, after the number of clients fell by half, Hesed offices in Polotsk and Vitebsk merged.

Israel is certainly seeing the impact of this trend. Russia and Ukraine alone provided Israel with most of its immigrants in 2017 — the first year this has happened in over a decade. In Azerbaijan, many Jews leave for Moscow, where they can easily obtain work visas and where many wealthy Azeri Jews can help them put down roots.

Davidov, the head of The Jewish House, says he is aware of the bigger picture.

“We’ll soon be gone anyway,” he said. “Is saving a few thousand dollars a year really worth tearing all this down?”