About the city of Urmia, its Jewish community, and the story of Shimon Yaakobi, a jeweler born in the city. Published in the newspaper Davar on Tuesday, November 28, 1972 (pages 7 and 11), in Aharon Megged’s column “Interview of an Ordinary Day.”
Shimon Yaakobi is 73 years old today. A tall, upright man, with a dignified face, stern and quiet. He was born in the city of Urmia—now Rezaye—in Persian Azerbaijan. There, according to local tradition, are the mountains of Ararat, a wild and turbulent region where the borders of Persia, Turkey, Armenia, Soviet Azerbaijan, and Iraq meet. It is a land of many tribes and religions—Shiite Muslims, Christians, Kurds, Armenians, Turks, and Jews. “Beyond the mountains of darkness,” says Shimon Yaakobi.
The language he speaks with his sons would not be understood by strangers. It is the Jewish dialect of Urmia—a dialect combining Aramaic with Assyrian, Persian, and Turkish. He himself speaks seven languages: Persian, Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian, Assyrian, Arabic, and Hebrew.
Severe cold prevails there in winter. There is snow and frost, while the summers are hot and dry. The valleys and plains between the mountains and around the salt lake of Urmia are extremely fertile and densely populated. It is a land of vineyards, orchards, and tobacco plantations, which has always attracted conquerors—from the Mongols to various nomadic tribes. Kurds and Shakhsevan tribes still wander through it and block its routes. The great market city to the north is the renowned Tabriz.
Urmia had an ancient Jewish community, numbering five or six hundred families, who lived in a ghetto surrounded by hostility, religious fanaticism, and superstition. Women did not leave their homes for fear of the non-Jews, and after dark everyone shut themselves inside. If a Jew touched fruit or vegetables, people said they had been defiled; if a Jew walked along a Muslim street, he would be cursed, spat at, and often physically assaulted. The Jews lived under the protection of the Shah and the authorities; his representative in the city, the police officer, protected them, whether by order of his superiors or in return for the bribes he received. But governments changed frequently, and with every change of regime, rebellion, or uprising, the Jews were among the first victims.
The Jews were jewelers and merchants of cloth and wool. With their merchandise they traveled among the surrounding villages and towns. Shimon Yaakobi came from a family of jewelers, generation after generation. His grandfather and father bought gold and Russian and Turkish gold coins, melted them down, and turned them into jewelry—exquisite works of craftsmanship—which they sold to the wealthy people of the city, landowners and palace owners, some of whom possessed dozens of villages.
Shimon studied in the heder, learning Torah and prayer. The rabbi knew nothing of the “outside” sciences; he did not even know how to write numerals, and the children in the religious school did not learn arithmetic. When the Alliance Israélite Universelle sought to establish an Alliance school in the city, members of the community opposed it, fearing that it would bring bad culture.
At the age of ten he had already begun practicing the craft of his ancestors, and when he grew older, he traveled from city to city with jewelry. Once, while he was in one of the cities, he received a telegram from his father telling him that he was engaged. He blessed his father and God, returned to Urmia, and married his bride, who was fourteen years old. Two years later, he already had a firstborn son.
After the First World War, chaos prevailed throughout the region. There was no law and no authority. Christians massacred Muslims and looted shops; they seized Jews and threatened them with weapons, demanding their money or threatening to kill them. There was famine. People ate raisins instead of sugar and sheep’s cheese instead of bread. After the Christians came the Kurds, looting and murdering. Thousands of Christians and dozens of Jews were killed.
Ismail Agha, the Kurdish governor, once came to Shimon’s father, brought him his sword, and ordered him to decorate it with gold and precious stones. When the work was finished and he saw how beautiful it was, he ordered that the father’s hand be cut off, so that he could not decorate another sword in the same way. A great outcry arose, and the father bought back his hand with a ransom. But they threw him into prison and immersed him, fully clothed, in the icy snow water. His end would have been terrible had the government not changed again; Ismail Agha was then captured and killed, and his body was dragged through the streets tied to a horse’s tail. Executions on the gallows in the town square were then everyday occurrences. Disaster followed disaster, and the Jews sought to escape. And where could they go, if not to the Land of Israel?
First the eldest son emigrated, and then—in 1934—Shimon. He traveled as far as Beirut and crossed the border on foot near Rosh Hanikra, and from there went to Jerusalem. His brother already had a small shop in the Old City, and the two worked together as silversmiths, each earning three Palestine pounds a month. From the Old City he moved to the Bukharim neighborhood, and once he had become somewhat established, he wrote to his family to come.
His wife and children reached Lebanon. They gave all their money to smugglers, who transported them by boat to the shores of the country together with other Jews. A storm arose at sea, broke the boat apart, and cast the passengers onto a deserted shore. They walked along the coast without knowing where they were going until they were captured by the British. The British brought them to Acre, gave them food, and transported them to Jerusalem. In Jerusalem they were put on trial, and Shimon’s wife spent several days in Bethlehem until she was released thanks to the Ottoman passport she possessed.
Shimon had three sons and three daughters, and one son fell in the battles for Jerusalem during the War of Independence.
After the death of his son, Shimon decided to move to Jaffa. He rented a shop on Bustrus Street and established himself there. He has remained there ever since, and he has another son, named after the son who fell. In the jewelry shop he practices the craft of the goldsmith together with his son Yaakov, who preserves the flame of the ancient art. Father and son buy jewelry from immigrants from the Eastern countries and sell it, sitting over the stones and working them with the utmost delicacy, weaving threads of silver into bracelets, earrings, nose rings, necklaces, rings, pendants, and brooches. It requires great imagination, a keen sense of beauty, and above all endless patience. Thus they weave legends in miniature out of silver, to delight people’s hearts, adorn brides’ necks, beautify women’s appearance, and amuse children. For just as silver is in the hand of the silversmith, so he may alloy it or refine it as he wishes. As the ancient sage once said: the silversmith who makes beautiful vessels and decorates them with a beautiful design thereby surely demonstrates the wisdom and perfection of the craftsman.
And the refining furnace of Shimon Yaakobi and his sons is this land, of which he says that only here is there rest after the trials and disasters beyond the mountains of darkness.
And blessed is the one who always believes.