Israeli journalists in Azerbaijan

Author: Petr Lyukimson, Israel, exclusively to VK

"Azerbaijan is a country of enormous opportunity" – this is the conclusion by ten journalists of several leading Israeli media who visited Azerbaijan in April on a familiarization visit.

"Organizing this trip”, CEO of Israel-Azerbaijan Association Aziz Lev Spivak said, “we have tried to make sure that the participants represented various editions. There were political observers of the two opposing ideological media - "Haaretz" and the website and the radio station "Seventh Channel", a journalist of the country's leading economic newspaper "Globes", presenter of the culinary program of one of the channels of the Israeli TV, tourism observers... Accordingly, we made the program: it included a meeting with deputies of Milli Majlis of Azerbaijan and the employees of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (it was interesting, of course, first and foremost for political journalists), the management of the oil industry, visiting museums, ski resort in Qusar, Cuba, and, of course, Azerbaijani cuisine. "


According to Lev Spivak, on the first evening, while walking through Baku, the Israeli guests experienced a shock. "We thought we were going to some god forsaken hole on the globe, and we found ourselves in one of the most beautiful cities in the world", they admitted.


Journalists were amazed by everything: architecture, museums, the intellectual level of the people they spoke to, the nature of Azerbaijan. "As it turned out”, Lev Spivak said, “despite the fact that in recent years contacts with Azerbaijan have intensified, ordinary Israelis (including journalists) do not know much about this country. For example, they were amazed to find out that Azerbaijan is one of the few if not the only republic in the former Soviet Union, where there has never been any anti-Semitism. In Kuba, they were struck by the fact that in a city with such a relatively small Jewish population there are two large synagogues, and in the third one, in which there is simply no one to pray, the authorities have decided to create a museum - "because you can not demolish the house of prayer." These guys have not seen anywhere else such an attitude toward Judaism and Jews, though each of them have traveled a lot around the world. In general, we believe that our task is to help journalists to discover Azerbaijan from a variety of sides. After such a discovery we can begin to implement large-scale cultural projects - spending days of Azerbaijan in Israel, more often than they are held today, organizing tours of Azerbaijani artists in the country".


Answering the question of what the Israelis took away as the memory of Azerbaijan, Spivak said, "You would not believe it! Jars of jam made of nuts and watermelon peels. They claim that had never eaten anything more delicious. "