“Yosef Ashkenazi,” a smile creeps across my new acquaintance’s wizened face as he introduces himself and adds “but not Ashkenadze!” That pronunciation would leave Yosef with a typically Georgian surname. But the –adzes and the –shvilis — another telltale Georgian name ending — have all but left Abkhazia. Seventy-year-old Yosef Ashkenazi is, of course, an Ashkenazi Jew, as are the majority of Jews left in this Caucasus territory that has declared itself an independent republic.
It is a republic recognized by only a handful of states in the world, most notably Russia, which has backed the current government strongly. Neighboring Georgia, meanwhile, continues to claim the land as its own. In 1992, more than 200,000 Georgians fled this territory, including the Georgian Jews, part of a wave of ethnic cleansing and atrocities committed by both sides in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union.
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