There is not much literature on Jewish necropolises in the territory
of the former Soviet Union and the amount of it dedicated to cemeteries
and other types of burials of the non-Ashkenazi Jewish sub-ethnic groups
is even less. In fact, we can only cite a number of studies carried out as far
back as in the 19th and early 20th centuries on the cemetery in the so-called
Jehoshaphat Valley in Chufut Kale, the famous Jewish Karaite necropolis
in the Crimean Mountains; studies of the Jehoshaphat Valley monuments
resumed in the Soviet times after a long pause by the Georgian semitologist
Nisan Babalikashvili. He also devoted a number of works to Jewish epitaphs in
Transcaucasia1. The untimely passed away scholar certainly occupies a special
place in the history of Soviet Hebrew and Jewish Studies. His papers that were
published in Georgia, where the attitude towards Jewish issues was relatively
liberal, stand out by virtue of their very existence and high proficiency amid
the utter lack of any Jewish studies in the former Soviet Union. Today, at long
last, already in the post-Soviet period, large-scale researches are being carried
out at the same Chufut Kale under the auspice of the International Center for
Jewish Education and Field Studies headed by Artem Fedorchuk. Apart from
Chufut Kale, the recent discovery by Israeli and Armenian archeologists of
a Jewish cemetery dating back to the 14th – 15th centuries, located in the
Armenian Highland to the south of Lake Sevan, is worth mentioning.