Haim Agajan Abraham
1897-1989
First entry: January 24, 1989
The memoir will be published soon by her under the title “The Stateless Central Asian Merchant: based on the journal of Haim Agajan Abraham born 1897”. See: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B00GJ926QM?ingress=0&visitId=042a2652-a38e-4aa7-b29f-f2c37a8b676f&ccs_id=e202155a-c977-4869-83a7-9ae53ec4a5f6
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
“My grandfather Shmuel had a brother named Ishmael who was also a wealthy merchant. At that time most of his work was in the trade of karakul skins (Central Asian sheep) and furriers. The market would buy these skins in their thousands, packed in large bales. There were large warehouses where we stored these furs and cleaned them, and then exported them abroad, for example to London.”
Jewish life in Marv
“After the prayer the whole congregation was invited to our house for a meal in the sukkah. Our sukkah was very large, and all the worshipers of the synagogue were hosted in it, and we honored the guests with holiday food and drinks.
The Simchat Torah meal had become a regular custom in our Sukkah, every year. In the synagogues of the Afghans, Bukharians, Iranians and Ashkenazis they did not hold a Simchat Torah meal but only came to our house.”
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.
Passport
Afghan passport of Haim Abraham. Haim 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.
Persian Jews 