It is with a great sadness and a feeling of deep loss that the EAJC has learned of the passing of an outstanding Georgian poet and interpeter, a scholar and a public community figure, a member of the EAJC General Council Jemal (Shimon) Adjiashvili, who has passed away on January 5, 2013. He was 69.

Jemal-Shimon Adjiashvili was born in 1944, in Georgia, in the town of Senaki. He graduated from the Persian Languages Department of the Eastern Studies Department of the Tbilisi State University. While he was still a student, he began to translate classic Persian poetry – Ferdowsi, Khayaaam, and Saadi. After graduating, he worked in Iran. In the 1970-1980s, he was mostly involved in translation and teaching. In 1993, he became chair of the Eastern Studies Department of the Sulhan Saba Orbelian State Pedagogical University.

Jemal Adjiashvili had translated many classical works of poetry into Georgian, including Biblical psalms and the works of the Jewish poets of Andalusia, ancient Egyptian hymns and Persian poetical classics, the dramatic poems of Shakespeare, Chikamatsu, Tirso de Molina, Carol Gozzi, the sonnets of Dante, Petrarch, Michelangelo, Rilke, and the poems of Vladimir Mayakovskiy, Boris Pasternak. Besides Persian, Jemal Adjiashvili could freely read (sensitive to the meaning of words, he avoided using the word “know” for foreign languages) and translate from Hebrew, Arabian, English, Italian, French and Spanish.

In 1979, he published a collection of translations into Georgian titled “Jewish Poetry of the Middle Ages,” which had been unique for the Soviet Union and had a wide global resonance.

He was the author of the “Awaken, o harp!” play about the history of Georgian Jews. The play was put up for the first time in Israel, in 1988.

Jemal Adjiashvili had won multiple most prestigious national and international awards. He was the laureate of the State Prize of Georgia (1984), recipient of the Order of Honor (1996), awarded the Ivane Machabeli Prize (1995) and the Iliya Chavchadze Prize of the Institut Géorgien Européen, Paris (1991).

After Georgia gained its independence, Jemal Adjiashvili had been active in public affairs and politics, was a member of the State Council (1992), and was elected to the Georgian parliament three times (in 1992, 1995, and 2000 respectively).

In 2009, Jemal Adjiashvili was elected the Director General of the World Congress of Georgian Jews. From the very moment of the inception of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress, he represented in it the community of Georgian Jews, and was a member of the EAJC General Council.

A wonderful person, a close friend, and a dear colleague has passed away. Baruch dayan ha-emeth.