Kareli

Kareli, a town in Shida Kartli, Georgia, is located on the river Mtkvari. There was a time when the number of Jews living in Kareli was fairly vast but today that is not the case, on this day the Jewish population is very small; it only consists of 400 beings. Some say the word “Kareli” doesn’t mean the “The place with wind”, and its actual origin is an Herbew word, of men, but that is just an assumption. In old times Jews were accounted as the workers of Tsitsishvili; later as the state peasants. Jews in Kareli usually were merchants and lived ordinary lives, their appearances and rules corresponded with Kareli’s population. The sites you can find in this town are Kareli Synagogue, which was built in the 20th century and a Jewish graveyard.

Photo attribution: Nickniko, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons