Kutaisi Jewish Quarter

Kutaisi had one of the largest Jewish communities in Georgia, and its traces are concentrated on a single street. Boris Gaponov Street runs through the Sapichkhia district on the right bank of the Rioni, and within less than a hundred metres it holds three synagogues.

The oldest, the Small Synagogue, dates from 1815 — plain stone, almost indistinguishable from a house. A second was built around 1863. The main one, the Great Synagogue of 1886, is handled in a Romanesque Revival manner: tall arched windows, a stone facade, and inside a wooden gallery under a painted ceiling. This is the building still in use.

The street name is a story of its own. Boris Gaponov was a Kutaisi Jew who translated Rustaveli's The Knight in the Panther's Skin into Hebrew, working alone on night shifts at the local newspaper. The translation was published in Israel in 1969; he emigrated in 1971 and died soon after.

The community today is very small — most families left for Israel in the 1970s and again in the 1990s. The buildings remain, and the Great Synagogue opens several times a week; the caretaker will normally let visitors in.

This is not a sight with an exhibition and a ticket desk. It is a fifty-minute walk along a narrow street where three buildings from three different centuries stand almost in a row, and where you see a part of Kutaisi that rarely reaches the guidebooks.

A short piece of background helps. Jews have lived in Georgia for more than two thousand years, and Kutaisi was for a long period the centre of Georgian Jewish life. By the end of the 19th century the quarter around this street held a few thousand people, with its own schools, bakeries and communal institutions, most of them trading or working in crafts. In the last decades of the 20th century that whole world moved, almost in its entirety, to Israel.