Isaac Kaya Russian and Soviet teacher, historian, ethnographer, linguist Date of Birth: 18.10.1887

1. Early Life and Education
2. Educational Pioneer
3. Scholar and Teacher
4. Cultural and Public Activities
5. World War II and Holocaust

Early Life and Education

Isaac Samuilovich Kaya was born on October 18, 1887, in Feodosiya, Crimea, to a family of small shopkeepers. In 1894, the family moved to Karasubazar (now Belogorsk), where he attended the local Talmud-Torah. From a young age, Kaya displayed extraordinary abilities. After graduating, the Karasubazar Krymchak community sent him to a teacher's seminary in Vilnius (now Vilnius) with public funds. Kaya became the first Krymchak to receive a higher education.

Educational Pioneer

In 1910, upon graduating from seminary, Kaya returned to Karasubazar, where he established and led the first school (Talmud-Torah) for Krymchak children, where instruction was conducted in their native language. He also organized literacy classes for adults. Kaya played an active role in the First Congress of Krymchaks and the first census of the Krymchak population (1913).

Scholar and Teacher

After the Revolution and the end of the Civil War, Kaya became involved in the education system of Crimea, combining teaching with scientific-research work. While working as a teacher, Kaya enrolled in the evening department of Taurida University, majoring in Oriental Studies. Before the outbreak of the war, he graduated from the evening department of the Simferopol Pedagogical Institute, specializing in mathematics.

Kaya lived in Kerch at the start of the Great Patriotic War. In 1942, after the liberation of the city from German occupation, he evacuated to Alma-Ata. In 1944, he returned to Krasnodar and, in 1948, moved with his family to Odessa.

Throughout his life, Kaya worked as a teacher, teaching physics and mathematics in high school and conducting research on the history and ethnography of the Krymchaks. He died on March 30, 1956, at the age of 69 and is buried in the Third Jewish Cemetery in Odessa.

Cultural and Public Activities

Kaya was a man of encyclopedic knowledge, fluent in Krymchak, Russian, Crimean Tatar, Hebrew, German, Arabic, and Persian. In 1910, he founded the Krymchak charitable society "Oyser-Dalim" in Simferopol, which provided loans to the poor on favorable terms.

Kaya also played a significant role in the First Congress of Krymchaks in 1913. Following the convention, it was decided to conduct a census of the Krymchak population to investigate their settlement patterns, age and gender composition, marital status, and socio-economic status. Kaya was entrusted with the organizational work and implementation of the census, which covered 5282 individuals. He submitted the completed questionnaires, each containing answers to 50 questions, to the State Museum of Ethnography of the USSR for safekeeping.

Kaya began his research on Krymchak history and ethnography around this time, with his findings published in the journal "Yevreiskaya Starina" (1914, 1916). As part of the national policy of separating school from church, all midrashim and the Karasubazar Talmud-Torah were closed in Crimea in 1921. This effectively destroyed the system of Krymchak social institutions that had existed before the revolution.

The creation of new Soviet structures based on national-cultural autonomy began. Public figures who had emerged before the revolution, including Kaya and A. Peysakh, assumed leadership roles. In 1926, the First All-Crimean Congress of Krymchak Cultural and Educational Societies proposed a comprehensive program for national-cultural development.

Kaya wrote and published the first Krymchak primer and textbook for elementary classes as part of the school reform. However, due to a sharp turn in state national policy in the late 1930s, Krymchak schools, clubs, and cultural-educational societies were liquidated.

World War II and Holocaust

During the Great Patriotic War, Kaya and his family found themselves in Kerch, occupied by German forces. Kaya recognized the threat to the Jewish population from the occupation authorities' actions. He established an initiative group of five members (Kaya, I. I. Valit, M. S. Tokatly, A. S. Mizrahi, and Z. Ya. Borokhov) to demonstrate to the occupation authorities that Krymchaks were Crimean Jews-Talmudists, similar to Crimean Karaites but differentiated by their adherence to Talmudic Judaism and the absence of a myth about their non-Jewish origin.

The arguments were presented so effectively that the German administration postponed the execution of Krymchaks in Kerch pending further clarification from Berlin. A response arrived in late December, stating that the Kerch Krymchaks were to be shot on January 3, 1942. However, the Kerch-Feodosiya landing liberated the city on December 30, 1941, saving 826 Kerch Krymchaks. Before the Germans retook the city, the majority of the survivors managed to cross the Kerch Strait.