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Abstract

Mountain Jews are a Jewish sub-ethnic group traditionally residing in the Eastern Caucasus. Throughout the Soviet era, Mountain Jews continued to reside in the Caucasus, despite the community's urbanization and migration from villages to cities. Traditional practices associated with life-cycle rites continued to be preserved. Even religious marriages were practiced by the majority of the community, despite prohibitions imposed by the Soviet regime.

In the 1990s, the socio-political and economic situation in the Caucasus changed, with active migration of Jews from the Caucasus to major Russian cities, Israel, and the United States. However, even under these conditions, Mountain Jews maintained endogamy; marriages, even with members of other Jewish groups, were extremely rare. The structure of the traditional wedding ceremony did not collapse, but it underwent certain changes in the new environment. Matchmaking remains of great importance; it remains an essential function for the elder women of the clan or nuclear family. The report will examine the main stages of the wedding ceremony and their transformations. It will also examine traditions associated with the first wedding night, how women today talk about them, their attitudes toward these rituals, and how these rituals are being transformed or preserved in different families in the modern world. These stories are usually quite emotional. While in most cases "ancestral traditions" are not criticized, and changes are described as necessary measures, traditions associated with the first wedding night are subject to condemnation.

My paper will be based on the corpus of interviews (approximately 50) with Mountain Jewish women from Derbent, Pyatigorsk, and Moscow.