Great Synagogue

When Boris Gaponov reported for a Kutaisi automobile plant newspaper, he had already spent years teaching himself the language that would define his legacy. Born in Yevpatoria, Crimea, in 1934, he arrived in Kutaisi as a child in 1941 when his family fled there during the war, and it was in this city’s Jewish quarter that he learned the basics of Hebrew from his grandfather, a rabbi, before continuing on his own. He later studied Persian at Moscow’s Institute of Oriental Languages, but financial hardship forced him to abandon his studies and return to Georgia. In 1969, his translation of Shota Rustaveli’s 12th century epic, The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, into Hebrew was published in Israel, and it became a genuine event in Hebrew letters rather than a curiosity.

The synagogue his monument stands beside has outlasted nearly everything around it. Built in 1886 in a Neo-Romanesque style that has little in common with the Georgian Orthodox architecture surrounding it, the building’s interior is fully painted, and its triple arched facade on Gaponov Street remains one of the more striking pieces of religious architecture in the city. It survived the Soviet period at a time when synagogues elsewhere were seized or demolished, and today there are still just enough worshippers left in Kutaisi to gather a minyan, a small, persistent congregation inside a building designed for a much larger one.

Gaponov never lived to see how thoroughly his adopted city would embrace him. He emigrated to Israel in 1971, won a national prize there, and died the following year in Ramat Gan, only in his late thirties. The monument outside the synagogue wasn’t erected until 2014, more than four decades after his death. The street it stands on now carries his name, which means a man who couldn’t afford to finish his own university education ended up with a permanent address on the street of the synagogue that shaped him.