Instead of going on a honeymoon, I began chemo

As told to Esther Shaindy Leshkowitz by Elana Chaya Krasinskaya

MY

family is from Azerbaijan, and we are called Kavkazi or Gorsky Jews, as well as Mountain Jews, because our communities were traditionally located in the remote mountainous regions of the Caucasus. For centuries, our community kept to itself; we have different minhagim from other Jews. In more recent years, the majority of Kavkazi Jews lived in the district of Quba, and for years, we had a strong frum community with shuls, yeshivot, and talmidei chachamim. Historically, many families would send their children to learn Torah in Eretz Yisrael (in what was then Palestine).

Then communism came, and it became difficult to observe mitzvot. By the time I was born in 1974, we were afraid to say we were Jewish, and we didn’t observe anything. I only knew that my mother was Jewish.

Every Friday, my mom would pick me and my sister up from school and say, “We are going to Bobbie tonight.”

My grandmother would light candles in her kitchen. It looked beautiful, and at the same time, mysterious.

“It is Shabbat,” she would say, but we didn’t really know the meaning behind it. She would prepare a simple dinner, which our big family would eat together in the kitchen, not in the dining room.

Pesach time we always had matzah, but there was bread, too. The adults didn’t eat the bread; only the children did. We kids loved eating matzah. It was like a treat. It wasn’t easy to get, and we cherished it.

I remember asking my grandmother about the matzah. “Why are we eating this dry bread?” I asked.

She told me, “There was a bad man who was trying to kill us, and his name was Pharaoh, but G-d saved us.”

That was all I knew.