Azerbaijan City Earmarks Land for Jewish Cultural Center, Kosher Eatery
Image by wikicommons
The city of Baku in Azerbaijan has allocated land for the construction of a Jewish cultural center and the Azeri capital’s first kosher restaurant.
The municipality has given the community of Mountain Jews, one of the country’s three Jewish communities, approximately 600 square yards for the restaurant, which will be part of a three-story cultural center that the community intends to build on the land, according to a report Monday by Russia’s Jewish News Agency.
The opening “will be a landmark event for Jewish life in Baku,” a statement on the website of the Mountain Jew community read. “The creation of such a complex will serve our foreign guests, who are experiencing some difficulties in Baku with kosher meals as the country has few kosher products.”
Rabbi Shneor Segal, chief envoy to Azerbaijan of Chabad, confirmed to JTA that Baku currently does not have any strictly kosher restaurant. Chabad also is planning to open a large cultural center in Baku with help from the authorities sometime before 2016, he said. The Chabad center also will have a kosher restaurant, he said.
Azerbaijan has a Jewish population of about 20,000, according to the World Jewish Congress, with 75 percent residing in Baku. Despite strong traditionalist tendencies, most Azeri Jews are not observant, Segal said.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
