Haim Agajan Abraham 1897-1989
By courtesy of his granddaughter Dahlia Abraham-Klein.
The memoir was published under the title “The Stateless Central Asian Merchant: based on the journal of Haim Agajan Abraham born 1897”.
The PJRA contains a digital copy of the complete diary in Judeo-Tajik, the passport as well as private family letters.
Family origins
Haim Abraham’s ancestry is from Yazd, from where the family migrated in the late 18th century to Mashhad. Around 1880 one part of the family moved to Marv where business was lucrative. Another part of the family lived in Afghanistan. Shortly after Agajan Rahamim, Haim’s father, also arrived in Marv and married Hannah where two or three of their children were born. They lived in Marv twenty-five years, before they were forced to move to Samarkand.
Trade
Jewish life in Marv
Connections
Hanna Garji and husband Rachamim Abramoff in Israel for their 100th birthday and dedication of Torah, around 1967. (This is another branch of the Garji family mentioned under the section “family archives”). When the Afghan synagogues in which the scrolls were housed, closed in the early 1950s, Rahamim Shamash, Haim’s father, transported them to two Afghan synagogues in southern Tel Aviv (Neve Yerushalayim and Yeshua V’Rahamim), where many Afghani Jews first lived.
Afghan Passports
Aquiring an Afghan passport became a strategy to evade the new Soviet border regime, especially from the 1930s onwards. Bukharan Jews, too were sometimes able to get an Afghan passport in order to maintain their business travels. Family members of Haim Abraham initially travelled from Samarkand to Bukhara, Baku, and back to Marv. In the early 1920s he got a permit to leave Russia and went to Mazar-i Sharif, Afghanistan, where his father had established a business. He later returned to Russia, first to Kerki, then Moscow. From 1934-38 he lived and worked in Kabul and Andkhoy. In 1943, he sent his son-in-law to buy a plot of land for him in Jerusalem. Haim then went to Peshawar and Bombay, where he continued trade in fabrics. After some time in Israel (1948-52), he left for Milan. One of his son’s moved to New York and started a gem-stone business, while Haim continued to travel between Bombay and Milan, later on also to Burma, Taipei, Kobe, Tehran and Tokyo. The passport had to be extended for a fee each year. This example was valid until 1974.
