Nash Didan

Our People

Nash Didan, meaning “our people” in Aramaic, is the name by which a Jewish community with ancient roots is known today. The community originated in the region of Urmia, Salmas, Başkale, and surrounding areas of northwestern Iran and eastern Anatolia.

For generations, members of the community lived in Urmia, Salmas, Başkale, and in other cities, towns, and villages throughout the region. Although families were often identified by their particular town or village, they shared deep family, religious, cultural, and historical connections. It was a mountainous area connecting Persia, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and the Caucasus — a meeting place of peoples, languages, religions, and cultures.

Within this world, the Jews of the region maintained family and communal life, synagogues, and Jewish traditions. They engaged in trade and various crafts, and in some settlements also in agriculture and sheep raising. Family, commercial, and marriage ties connected the communities on both sides of what is today an international border.

One of the community’s most distinctive characteristics was Lishan Didan – “our language”: Jewish varieties of Northeastern Neo-Aramaic that served as the home and everyday language of many members of the community.

Alongside Aramaic, community members also spoke the languages of their surroundings — Azerbaijani, Turkish, Persian, and Kurdish — depending on where they lived and with whom they came into contact. Thus emerged a Jewish world deeply rooted in its own traditions while also being part of the multilingual and multicultural environment around it.

The Roots of an Ancient Community

The Jewish presence in the region is documented over many centuries.

Medieval sources already mention Urmia as a place where Jews lived, and a document associated with a Judeo-Arabic manuscript attests to the existence of a synagogue in Urmia about a thousand years ago.

In the 19th century, the documentation becomes more detailed. Travelers who visited the region described organized Jewish communities, synagogues, and hundreds of Jewish families in Urmia and Salmas. Additional accounts indicate a Jewish presence in the Başkale area and beyond the mountains as well.

Alongside the historical documentation, a longstanding tradition among members of the community connects the beginnings of Jewish settlement in the region to the Assyrian exile of the Kingdom of Israel in the eighth century BCE. This is an important ancestral tradition in the community’s identity. Existing research allows us to document with confidence a Jewish presence in the region for at least about a thousand years, while the more ancient beginnings of the community remain part of tradition and ongoing research. The documented history of these communities provides an important foundation for understanding the people who today identify with the broader heritage of Nash Didan.

Lishan Didan – Our Language

Language is one of the most distinctive treasures carried by the community.

The Aramaic of the Jews of Urmia and its surroundings was a living language. It was spoken at home, used to tell stories, argue, laugh, bless children, and pass memories from one generation to the next.

There was not one identical dialect throughout the region. Urmia, Salmas, and other communities had their own forms of speech, and over the generations the dialects absorbed words and influences from the languages around them.

In the 20th century, these dialects were documented in extensive linguistic research, including the work of Irene Garbell and Geoffrey Khan. Thanks to the documentation of native speakers, not only words and grammar were preserved, but also stories, expressions, customs, and memories of the world from which the language emerged.

After immigration to Israel, Hebrew became the principal language of the younger generations, and today Lishan Didan is a heritage language at risk of disappearing. For this reason, documenting the words, voices, and stories that remain is a central part of preserving the community’s heritage.

Life Between Urmia, Salmas, and Başkale

Community life existed within a world of family, work, faith, and tradition.

Jews engaged in trade in fabrics, jewelry, food, and dried fruit, as well as goldsmithing and money changing. In smaller settlements, some families also worked in agriculture, vineyards, and animal husbandry.

The harsh winters of the region shaped the way people lived. Families prepared in advance for months of snow and cold, stored food, and preserved produce. Children learned prayers, blessings, Torah, and Hebrew, and later general educational frameworks were also established.

Weddings, holidays, and family celebrations were important centers of communal life. Around them developed customs, music, foods, and ceremonies, some of which continued to live on even after immigration to Israel.

The cuisine of Nash Didan also tells the story of the region: a Jewish cuisine shaped through encounters with Persian, Azerbaijani, Turkish, and Kurdish cultures, while acquiring a distinctive character in each family and community.

A Community Within a World of Peoples and Cultures

For generations, the Jews of the Nash Didan communities lived alongside Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Assyrians, Armenians, and other groups.

Markets, work, trade, and neighborhood life created connections between the communities. People in the region often knew several languages and lived within a diverse cultural environment.

The history of the region also included difficult periods of instability, struggles for control, and violence. As a minority community, Jewish life was affected by local rulers and by changing relationships between the different groups living in the region.

World War I was a major turning point. The area between Urmia, Salmas, Van, and Hakkari became a theater of war, changes of rule, and displacement. Communities suffered, families moved, and the world that had existed in the region for generations began to change fundamentally.

From Urmia to Jerusalem

The connection to the Land of Israel existed even before the major waves of immigration, through rabbis, emissaries, and religious books.

From the late 19th century and throughout the 20th century, families from the community began making their way to the Land of Israel. At times, the journey was long and difficult, lasting months or even years and passing through different countries and continents.

After immigration, members of the community began rebuilding their lives in Israel. Many settled in Jerusalem, particularly in neighborhoods where groups of immigrants from Urmia and its surroundings established themselves. They built families, communal institutions, and synagogues that served not only as places of prayer but also as centers for maintaining community ties and preserving tradition.

Among the synagogues associated with the community in Jerusalem were Yavneh Synagogue and Shmuel HaNavi Synagogue for the Edat HaTargum. These synagogues provided places where the prayers, customs, and traditions brought by the immigrants from their homeland could continue to be heard and practiced.

Over the years, many families also moved to Holon, Tel Aviv, and other parts of Israel. The community thus became geographically dispersed, while continuing to maintain family and social connections and a shared sense of belonging.

The Emergence of the Name “Nash Didan”

It was precisely within the new reality of the State of Israel that the broader meaning of the expression Nash Didan gradually took shape.

In Israel, people who had come from Urmia, Salmas, Başkale, and different villages and settlements throughout the region met one another. In their homeland, many had primarily been identified by their place of residence — Urmia, Salmas, Başkale, or a particular village. In Israel, however, a new reality emerged in which people from different places within the same geographic region met and began building a shared life.

Within this reality, the Aramaic expression “Nash Didan” – “our people” acquired a broader meaning of belonging. Among immigrants and their descendants, it gradually became the name associated with the community as a whole.

A Heritage That Lives On Today

Today, most descendants of the community live far from the cities and villages where their ancestors lived.

But the heritage continues.

It lives in family names and old photographs, in recipes passed down through families, in melodies and customs, in Aramaic words still heard around the family table, in immigration stories, and in memories passed from parents to children and grandchildren.

For decades, efforts were made to preserve this heritage through community and cultural activities. Gatherings, cultural evenings, performances, and theatrical productions enabled members of the older generation to bring their language, stories, music, customs, and humor to the stage and to the wider public.

This cultural activity was much more than entertainment. It was a way of preserving memories and transmitting them from one generation to the next. For younger members of the community, these gatherings and performances provided an opportunity to hear the language, learn the stories, and experience part of the world from which their parents and grandparents had come.

Performances, gatherings, and theatrical productions organized by members of the community continued until only a few years ago and for a long period formed an important part of the cultural life of Nash Didan descendants. Through the stage and through community gatherings, stories, characters, songs, humor, customs, and memories continued to live on — things that might otherwise not have reached the next generation.

Today, the heritage continues in gatherings of community members and their descendants.

Groups still meet to maintain their connections, remember their families and places of origin, and above all, to speak Lishan Didan with one another.

For those who still speak the language, such a gathering is more than an act of linguistic preservation. When people sit together and converse in Lishan Didan, the language returns, even briefly, to its natural setting — among people, within a family and community, in everyday life.

In this way, Lishan Didan continues to exist not only in books, dictionaries, academic research, and recordings, but also in the voices of people who still use it and pass it on.

The heritage also lives in documents, diaries, and personal testimonies — including the diary of Sinior Demirel, which records from a personal perspective the life of the region during the turbulent period of the early twentieth century.

Each of these elements tells part of a larger story.

It is the story of a Jewish community that lived for generations in the region between Lake Urmia and Lake Van; that preserved its Jewish identity and language within a world of many cultures and languages; that experienced wars, displacement, and immigration; that built a new life, synagogues, and communal institutions in Israel; and whose members and descendants continue to carry its memory in Israel and throughout the world.

Nash Didan.

The Nash Didan Community Archive

Nash Didan is also a living community archive, created to preserve and make accessible the story of the community for future generations.

The archive brings together family photographs, historical documents, immigration stories, personal memories, recipes, customs, historical newspaper clippings, recordings, videos, and material documenting Lishan Didan and the cultural life of the community.

These materials come from families and community members and help connect individual memories with the broader history of Nash Didan. The archive continues to grow as additional photographs, documents, testimonies, and family stories are preserved and shared.

Preserving this material is not only a way of looking back. It is a way of ensuring that the people, places, language, customs, and experiences that shaped the community remain accessible to future generations.

Nash Didan.

Our People.