A shtetl in a courtyard: The last Jews of Abkhazia7 min read
On the morning of March 7, 2026, residents of Sukhum\i (Sokhumi/Aq’ea) in the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia were shocked to discover that the façade of the region’s only functioning synagogue had been splashed with red paint the previous night. The act of vandalism came only four months after an attempted arson attack on the same building, which local supporters had been trying to restore after decades of neglect. The incident quickly spilled onto social media in Abkhazia and beyond, where comment sections brimmed with dismissive remarks about Israel and openly antisemitic outbursts. For the handful of Jews who still live in Abkhazia, the episode is a stark reminder of how precarious their centuries-long presence has become. The synagogue is not only a fragile historical structure but the last visible symbol of a community that numbered in the thousands just three and a half decades ago.
Today, Abkhazia’s minuscule Jewish community consists mostly of a handful of elderly members. Estimates of the breakaway region’s Jewish population range from roughly one hundred to perhaps only a few dozen residents, most of them elderly and concentrated in the region’s capital, Sukhum\i. The community revolves around the synagogue, which also hosts the cultural and philanthropic society Shalom. Founded in 1994 in the aftermath of Abkhazia’s separatist war against Georgia, Shalom regularly organizes Jewish holiday gatherings and oversees the synagogue’s upkeep largely through its own limited means. During the Soviet period, several thousand Jews lived in Abkhazia, with Sukhum\i alone home to nearly 1,500 Ashkenazi, Georgian, and Mountain Jews. Today, the average age of those who remain reportedly exceeds seventy, and Sabbath congregations rarely draw more than a small handful of participants. Nevertheless, a few determined individuals continue to maintain the synagogue and the fragile institutions of Jewish communal life in an effort to prevent the Jewish presence in Abkhazia – however diminished – from disappearing entirely.
The history of Abkhazia’s Jewry, nonetheless, extends far beyond the several unassuming houses of Sukhum\i’s synagogue compound and the handful of congregants whose lives revolve around it.
The territory of modern-day Abkhazia has long formed part of the wider cultural and commercial networks of the Black Sea basin. In antiquity, the region belonged to the Kingdom of Colchis, best known in Greek mythology as the destination of the Argonauts’ expedition. Beginning in the first millennium BCE, Greek merchants and settlers established trading colonies along the Caucasian littoral of the Black Sea. The ancient Greek colony Dioscurias, which developed into a significant commercial port linking the Caucasus with the Mediterranean world, became the precursor of the modern city of Sukhum\i. Classical authors such as Strabo described the region as a crossroads where merchants from many lands converged. Early Christian tradition also associates the eastern Black Sea coast with missionary activity by apostles such as Andrew the First-Called and Simon the Zealot. During the early modern period, under Ottoman rule, Abkhazia maintained maritime connections with ports across the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean as well as land connections with Asia Minor and the rest of the Caucasus. These long-standing commercial and cultural ties formed the background against which the region’s modern history – including the emergence of sizable Jewish, Pontic Greek, and Armenian communities in coastal cities in the nineteenth century – later unfolded.
Following the Russian annexation of Georgian principalities and the conquest of the northwestern Caucasus in the early and mid-nineteenth century, tsarist authorities began developing Abkhazia’s coastal region as part of the empire’s resort and cash-crop belt. By the early twentieth century, thanks to its subtropical climate, fertile soils, and scenic coastline, the Caucasian Black Sea littoral between Sochi and Sukhum\i was increasingly marketed as a health and leisure destination for Russian elites. This emerging resort belt, often labeled the Russian Riviera, stimulated investment in real estate, hotels, trade, small-scale urban services, and tobacco factories. Alongside sizable waves of settlers from across Georgia and Greek and Armenian immigrants from the Ottoman Empire, these economic opportunities also encouraged limited Jewish settlement despite the region’s location beyond the Pale of Settlement. After Russian authorities permitted Jewish artisans and merchants to reside in Sukhum\i in the 1840s, small communities gradually emerged. The earliest settlers included both Ashkenazi Jews from Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus and Georgian Jews from nearby western Georgian towns, where Jewish communities had existed for centuries, and their members had long integrated various attributes of Georgian culture. The 1897 Russian imperial census recorded 156 Jews in Sukhumi. Though modest in size, this population laid the institutional foundations of Jewish life in Abkhazia, including the construction of a synagogue in the early twentieth century.
In the decades that followed, Jewish presence in Sukhum\i gradually expanded. As elsewhere in the Caucasus, Ashkenazi and Georgian Jews often maintained separate houses of worship located in close proximity to one another. During the Soviet period, continued migration from other parts of the Soviet Union further increased the Jewish population of Sukhum\i and the nearby resort town of Gagra. By the late Soviet period, several thousand Jews of Ashkenazi, Georgian, and Mountain Jewish backgrounds lived in Abkhazia, their majority concentrated in Sukhum\i.
The community’s fate changed dramatically with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the outbreak of the secessionist war in Abkhazia in 1992-1993. As fighting engulfed Sukhum\i and other coastal towns, most Jews fled the region, while a series of organized evacuation operations conducted by Sokhnut (the Jewish Agency for Israel) transported hundreds of Jewish residents to Israel. These evacuations unfolded alongside the departure of other long-established minorities from Abkhazia, including the Pontic Greek population and most of the region’s smaller Estonian community. By the time the war ended in September 1993, roughly 1,000 Jews had been evacuated from the city, leaving only several hundred behind amid the destruction and uncertainty that followed the fall of Sukhum\i to Abkhaz forces.
Following the end of the devastating war, the Jewish presence in Abkhazia dwindled rapidly as many of those who had remained emigrated to Israel, Russia, the United States, or elsewhere. The small community that survived in Sukhum\i reorganized itself around the cultural and charitable society Shalom. Georgian Jews, who had once constituted a significant part of the local Jewish population, largely disappeared from Abkhazia during this period, leaving behind an overwhelmingly Ashkenazi and elderly remnant. Although Abkhazia’s Georgian Jews fled the 1992-93 secessionist war due to their cultural and linguistic association with the Georgians rather than their Jewish identity, more Georgian Jews migrated to Israel than to the Tbilisi-controlled territory of Georgia. As emigration continued and younger generations settled abroad, the community that remained grew steadily smaller and older, gradually assuming the fragile form that still exists today.
In recent decades, the surviving Jewish community in Sukhum\i has existed on the margins of Abkhazia’s isolated political and economic landscape. Financial and spiritual connections with the more vibrant and more affluent Jewish community in nearby Sochi have become increasingly important for the handful of Jews who remain in the breakaway republic. At the same time, Abkhazia’s de facto authorities have occasionally invoked the region’s Jewish heritage in public statements, praising the historical contributions of Jews to Abkhazia and sending greetings to the community on Jewish holidays. Aleksandr Ankvab, then Abkhazia’s de facto prime minister and later its de facto president, even invoked Israel’s Law of Return as an example when discussing policies aimed at encouraging members of the Abkhaz diaspora in Turkey and the Middle East to resettle in their ancestral homeland.
Today, the quiet courtyard that houses Sukhum\i’s two historic synagogues stands as one of the last tangible reminders of a once vibrant Jewish presence in Abkhazia. Against the backdrop of the region’s bleak economic landscape – and amid occasional acts of vandalism – renovation of the Ashkenazi synagogue progresses slowly. For Abkhazia’s steadily dwindling Jewish community, the courtyard remains more than a historical relic. It is a fragile link to a past in which Jews formed a visible part of the region’s cosmopolitan urban mosaic, and a testament to the persistence of a tight-knit community determined to keep that legacy from vanishing.
