Circassians

The Circassians have a tradition of thousands of years in which they have gone through many upheavals, upheavals that the naked eye will be able to spot while walking through the small village of Rehania, which has 1100 inhabitants. On the school wall full of colorful illustrations you can see evidence of their pagan past in the numerous stories of gods that would not put the stories of Greek mythology to shame. The prayer mosque built in the form of a spacious villa with a sloping roof reminiscent of Christian prayer houses in Eastern Europe is reminiscent of the Christian period of the Circassian people. Today the Circassians are Muslims following the Hundred Years' War between them and the Russian Czar, a war that claimed a million and a half victims and as a result of which they went into exile around the world and especially throughout the Turkish Empire which conditioned their entry on them agreeing to convert to Islam. The long war generally ended on May 21, 1864 - on this day it is customary to hold memorial ceremonies. In Israel, this is celebrated every year in rotation by the two only Circassian villages - Kfar Kama, the largest of them (3000 people) and Kfar Rihania. The ceremony opened with a procession from the historical part of the village that was built in the days of the first aliya in the form of a fortress to which the villagers arrive in traditional dress carrying green flags with 12 stars on them that symbolize the 12 tribes of the Circassian people and this is not the only resemblance to Judaism that I saw such as the importance of memory, their distribution everywhere in the world And the fact that it is important for them to point out that behind many successful people in the Arab world is probably a Circassian somewhere (did you know that the Jordanian king's guards such as the Jordanian Deputy Chief of Staff are Circassians).

In Israeli society the Holocaust occupies a prominent place in the public discourse and we all grow up in its terrible shadow. But there are also atrocities on the scale of genocide that are relegated to the margins of Israeli consciousness, whether out of ignorance or with deliberate intent so as not to detract from the power of 'our Holocaust'. This is the case with the Armenian Genocide, which Israel is trained to acknowledge, and the same with the Circassian Genocide, about which even less is heard.