Iva Chitidze
Maradia Tsaava
When Silva Iosebashvili, 54, recalls her childhood, her memories are filled with the aroma of freshly baked matzah bread and fruit gardens. In her mind, she is walking with her grandmother through the neighborhood and can feel the heat of the bakery near the Tskhinvali synagogue.
At times the life of Roza Tavdidishvili sounds like one of her fairy tales.
These portraits are a window into what remains of Georgia’s Jewish community. Over the past 30 years, the number of Jews living in Georgia has dropped from 24,800 to just 4000. The people featured in this essay represent the diversity of their community. Their way of life, attitudes toward religion, and lives are uniquely personal. Together, however, they create and continue the ancient tradition of the Georgian-Jewish experience.
When photographer Giorgi Rodionov stumbled across a box of old negatives, he uncovered a chapter of his family’s history with roots in Nazi Germany and the fate two women who shed their identities to save their lives.
The Guardian of Memories is a story about an ordinary man whose childhood dream come true in old age, when he became the first Jewish painter in Georgia.