Davitashvili, Dzhuna

Category: Healer

 

Eugenia "Juna" Yuvashevna Davitashvili (Georgian: ევგენია ჯუნა დავითაშვილი; 22 July 1949 – 8 June 2015) was a Russian faith healer of Assyrian descent. Juna  described herself as an astrologist and a poet as well as a healer.

She took her Georgian-language surname from her former husband. 

At the time that Dhzuna was practising, the Soviets were carrying out research on a host of psychic phenomenon, whilst officially denying that either such research was taking place, or that psychic phenomenon existed.  The principle reason was, of course, that this was a power that was not properly understood and thus could not be controlled.  The official line is characterised by the following statement :

 

But only the day after this official statement was reported,  Dzhuna Davitashvili was the honoured guest at the weekly "Thursday Club" meeting of employees of Komsomolskaya Pravda. The paper reported on the friendly get-together on August 29, noting the "unusual, innate Psychoenergetic powers of Dzhuna," and stated that she had taken part in three experiments at medical institutes during the summer. The paper added that it planned to keep its readers up to date on further developments in the field.

So these were very odd times to be a faith healer.  From the evidence, Dhzuna’s skills were in healing and ‘mind reading’ - inter composer communication.

 

Leonid Brezhnev had indeed used healers in the past, including a prominent practitioner of acupuncture and a native of Outer Mongolia known among the  Moscow elite only as "Lobsang." According to Craig Whitney in the New York Times, Dzhuna worked her "apparent miracle" on the Soviet chief of state when, "after years of decline," he appeared as "the picture of health and stamina in ….meetings with Western and communist leaders in Belgrade and Warsaw." These observations were made more than two years before Brezhnev's death in November 1982.

Soviet scientist, Alexander G. Spirikin, was a corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and a philosopher who made a special study of "bioenergy." Writing in Sovetskaya Rossiya (January 6, 1980), he castigated scientists for lack of moral courage in admitting that they had found psychic phenomena genuine and had, in fact, benefited from them.  But Spirikin then made the mistake of linking the concept of the biofield with spiritualism and religious mysticism, both anathema to Soviet ideology. He recalled that there had been "spiritists in Tzarist Russia" and "Rasputin, who charmed away bleeding," although these "did not participate in meetings of the Russian Academy of Sciences."

The Healing gifts of Dzhuna

 

Dzhuna was particularly gifted in being able to diagnose illness as well as help heal it.  From accounts at the time, she used the aura as an indicator of where the disease was. Leon Kolodny, a newspaper man wrote she was able to see "a radiance above the heads of people." He added: "When there are a lot of people in a room, she sees a rainbow hanging over them. … " But though she appears to have been able to see the aura, she herself stated that she diagnosed via touch:

 

Perhaps of great interest is that the chairman of the Ogonyok round table, Sergey Vlasov, noted that, although much had been written about Dzhuna, she was "not the only extrasenser," as there were an estimated "two hundred such people" in the Moscow area alone.  

 

Despite opposition elsewhere, Nicolai N. Blochin called for the establishment of an institute to test Dzhuna's healing powers. Blochin was president of the Academy of Medical Sciences; he twice received the Order of Lenin for special services to the Soviet state. 

The Radiometric Laboratory at Tbilisi University was experimenting in the transmission of such "biological information."  But whether any of these initiatives ever bore fruit or whether results were recorded is not known.  The climate for doing these things was not at all favourable. 

The Commission of the Ministry of Health sent out many veiled warnings about ‘unofficial’ healing.  It denounced "the groundlessness of claims" concerning the use of "biofields" to treat disease. The commission denied the possibility that Dzhuna could have cured anything, and attributed reports that she had done so to the incompetence of those who had observed the procedure. There was an undercurrent of threat in their reports as well. It warned against therapeutic work by people ‘without medical education’. Publicizing such practices in newspapers and magazines, it said, could lead to "regrettable consequences."  It was also very clear that the main problem was that it saw faith healing as a threat to its own members, citing the case of one patient who had "resorted to parapsychologists" instead of going to an oncological specialist.

So it had nothing to do with patients, but everything to do with vested interests.

Dr Targ

Dr Russell Targ’s visit

In 1983 and 1984, physicist and psi researcher, Russell Targ, his daughter Elisabeth Targ, and Keith [Blue] Harary visited the Soviet Union as guests of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In Moscow they were able to discuss remote viewing research with Russian scientists, visit psychics, including Davitashvili, and arrange a remote viewing experiment with her between Moscow and San Francisco. 

 

Targ’s daughter Elisabeth was a medical student at Stanford University who was fluent in Russian.

The remote viewing experiment spanned 16,000 kilometers. From her living room she described in detail a merry go round on Pier 39 in San Francisco, where Blue Harary was meant to be hiding.  Except that she started the description 6 hours before he got there, which rather indicates that she was reading Targ’s [or Harare’s ] mind and not remote viewing as such.

Life

 

Davitashvili  was born to Anna and Yuvash Sarkisov, one of 6 children - Georgiy, Vladimir, Emma Khinoeva, Andrey, and Aleksey.  She married Igor Matvienko in 1986.  An ethnic Assyrian, Juna -- or Yevgenia Yuvashevna Sardis, as she was known officially -- was born to an Iranian immigrant family residing in Russia's North Caucasus region of Krasnodar.  Her parents are said to have regarded her as "something strange" even as a child.  During her early years, spent in the Kuban region of the USSR, she perceived a "rainbow-like light, an aureole above flowers and trees."

Leon Kolodny, a newspaper man who had written previously about parapsychological tests, offered an enthusiastic portrait of Dzhuna Davitashvili in Komsomolskaya Pravda (August 16, 1980), Moscow's communist youth daily. He wrote that, as a child, "she heard not only the rustling of leaves in the wind but other sounds, as though the tree were an orchestra and each flower a singer."

Dzhuna left home at the age of fourteen, worked for several years servicing a projector in a movie house and then became a waitress. Eventually she became a masseuse for hospital patients, and it is at this point she first demonstrated her ability to heal.  Those who saw her work compared it to the traditional laying on of hands, however, although Dzhuna belonged to the minority population of the twenty-five thousand Assyrian Christians in the USSR, she did not attribute her healing gift to a religious conviction.  On the other hand ......

Dzhuna originally came to Moscow from Tbilisi as the protegee of a Georgian film producer, Otar Ioseliani. When Craig Whitney, Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, reported on her popularity (May 29, 1980), he noted that she was "besieged by patients unable to obtain satisfaction from the public health system." He added:

 

When in Moscow, Davitashvili used a polyclinic. The facilities at a polyclinic gave Dzhuna Davitashvili semiofficial status.  Earlier, she had worked from an apartment, but the crush of would-be patients had become too great. Her waiting list had grown out of manageable proportions, and applicants for her services had to be screened.  She charged a considerable amount for those able to afford it. Whitney reported that her fee was the equivalent of $375 each for her ‘prominent clientele’.

Davitashvili ‘shot to fame when passions for the occult grew after Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev started his liberalization reforms known as perestroika’.  She made her first public appearance in the late 1980s, with Russian rock musicians Igor Talkov and Andrei Derzhavin, and ‘was rumoured to have treated film stars from Hollywood and Europe’.  She disappeared from the public eye after the death of her son, Vakhtang Davitashvili, in 2001.

Death

Davitashvili died in Moscow on 8 June 2015, after two days in a coma, according to one of her friends, actor Stanislav Sadalsky. 

After her death more and more people started to come forward admitting they had been helped by her.  Russian lawmaker Oleg Finko said after the news about Juna's death spread on June 8 that he had been treated by Juna ‘several times’, and called her "an extraordinary person."

"She was a very fair person. When she knew she was not able to cure a certain disease, she refused to get involved. But she was able to tackle many illnesses," Finko said.

The president of the Russian Astrology School in Moscow, Aleksandr Zarayev, described Juna Davitashvili's importance to Russian society as similar to that of prominent Soviet-era bard Vladimir Vysotsky, adding that "Juna fulfilled her mission."

One issue of Komsomolskaya Pravda contained a commentary by a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Yuri Kobzarev, the specialist in radar and radio engineering who directed the Laboratory for BioElectronics. He strongly emphasized that the Dzhuna phenomenon should be regarded as "factual and real." He explained:

Observations

For iPad/iPhone users: tap letter twice to get list of items.

• Davitashvili, Dzhuna – Healing a bouquet of wilted roses and a headache
• Davitashvili, Dzhuna – Healing endorsements
• Davitashvili, Dzhuna – Healing examples
• Davitashvili, Dzhuna – Healing methods