Azerbaijan’s Jewish leaders sought permission to put up a memorial for the several thousand Mountain Jews they say were murdered by Armenians in 1918. The Baku Sun reported that the Jewish leaders made the request to President Ilham Aliyev at a gathering last month at the Human Rights Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan. The Jewish leaders cited research saying that some 3,000 Mountain Jews, along with tens of thousands of Azeris, were murdered in the region of Guba by Armenian bandits and nationalists — an incident marked March 31 by the Azeris as genocide. Historians are still investigating the killings, which they say where were covered up by for decades by the communist regime. Perhaps 40,000 Mountain Jews remain scattered about the remote passes of the mostly Muslim Caucasus.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.