Goga Ashkenazi

Goga Ashkenazi (born Gaukhar Yerkinovna Berkalieva; Russian: Гауха́р Ерки́новна Беркали́ева, Kazakh: Гауһар Еркінқызы Берқалиева; 1 February 1980) is a Kazakh-Russian businesswoman and socialite. She is the founder and CEO of MunaiGaz Engineering Group, a Kazakh oil and gas conglomerate. Since 2012, she has been head of the fashion label Vionnet, based in Milan.

Early life and education

Ashkenazi was born in the Zhambyl Oblast, Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. She grew up in Moscow, where her father, engineer Yerkin Berkaliev, was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party under Mikhail Gorbachev. Her mother, Saule, has degrees in both engineering and medicine. She has a sister, Meruert, who is 10 years older.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, her family moved back to Kazakhstan. Eager for their daughter to get a competitive education, her parents sent the 12-year-old Goga to boarding school in England. She first attended Buckswood Grange School in East Sussex followed by Stowe School, but was rusticated after being caught kissing a boy. She then attended Rugby School, earning five A levels. She studied modern history and economics at Somerville College, Oxford.

Ashkenazi Jews

Ashkenazi Jews, also known as Ashkenazic Jews or simply Ashkenazim (Hebrew: אַשְׁכְּנַזִּים, Ashkenazi Hebrew pronunciation: [ˌaʃkəˈnazim], singular: [ˌaʃkəˈnazi], Modern Hebrew: [aʃkenaˈzim, aʃkenaˈzi]; also יְהוּדֵי אַשְׁכֲּנַז Y'hudey Ashkenaz, lit. "The Jews of Germany"), are a Jewish ethnic division who coalesced as a distinct community of Jews in the Holy Roman Empire around the end of the 1st millennium. The traditional language of Ashkenazi Jews consisted of various dialects of Yiddish.

They established communities throughout Central and Eastern Europe, which had been their primary region of concentration and residence until recent times, evolving their own distinctive characteristics and diasporic identities. In the late Middle Ages the center of gravity of the Ashkenazi population, and its traditional cultural life, shifted steadily eastward, out of the German lands into Poland and Lithuania (including present-day Belarus and Ukraine). In the course of the late 18th and 19th centuries, those Jews who remained in or returned to the German lands experienced a cultural reorientation; under the influence of the Haskalah and the struggle for emancipation, as well the intellectual and cultural ferment in urban centers, they gradually abandoned the use of Yiddish, while developing new forms of Jewish religious life and cultural identity.

Ashkenazi (surname)

Ashkenazi is a surname, and may refer to: