Back to Bukhara How memory, tourism, and the diaspora sustain the last vestiges of Uzbekistan’s Jewish heritage
Best known as a stop on the Silk Road trade route, Uzbekistan’s ancient city of Bukhara was home to a thriving Jewish community for more than 2,000 years. But since the Soviet Union’s collapse in the 1990s, the overwhelming majority of Central Asia’s Bukharan Jews have moved abroad. As the small remaining population dwindles with each passing year, family homes have been converted into hotels and museums, synagogues have become tourist attractions, and Jewish cemeteries are maintained by charitable foundations. Members of the diaspora, meanwhile, often return to Uzbekistan looking to reconnect with their roots, fueling a tourism industry that has come to play a key role in preserving Bukharan Jewish culture. Freelance journalist Sasha Slobodov reports for The Beet.
This story first appeared in The Beet, a monthly email dispatch from Meduza covering Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. To get the next issued delivered directly to your inbox, sign up here.
In May 2023, a 74-year-old woman checked into the Grand Nodirbek Hotel, located in the historic center of Bukhara. Shortly after arriving, she noticed some wooden chests tucked away in a room that was formerly a 17th-century Bukharan Jewish hall. Overcome with emotion, she burst into tears.
According to the hotel manager, Sherzod, this is the story of how the Grand Nodirbek also became a museum. As it turns out, the woman was a Bukharan Jew who had traveled back to her birthplace for the first time in 40 years. And her mother had given her those exact chests as a dowry for her wedding day.
Prior to her departure, this guest urged the hotel management to create a museum dedicated to the Jewish community’s history. Later that year, the Grand Nodirbek opened an exhibit highlighting its spaces once central to local Bukharan Jewish life — the 17th-century summer hall, a 19th-century hall, the terrace, and the cellar.
With most of Uzbekistan’s Bukharan Jewish community now living abroad, this is just one example of how tourism and diaspora initiatives play a key role in preserving the remaining fragments of this vanishing past.
A long history on the Silk Road
The name Bukharan Jews comes from their presence in the Bukharan Emirate, specifically in the areas now corresponding to modern-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Historians trace the community’s roots back to the 6th century BCE, when Jews arrived from what is now Iran, settling in the trade hubs of Bukhara and Samarkand. This region, historically known as Transoxiana, was controlled by Turkic and Persian empires for centuries.
The Bukharan Jews spoke Bukhori, a Judeo-Persian dialect that incorporated numerous Hebrew words, and wrote in Persian using the Hebrew script. As many large Jewish settlements were located in the cities of the ancient Silk Road, Bukharan Jews maintained close ties to other nearby Jewish communities.
As the Russian Empire colonized Central Asia in the 19th century, the Bukharan Emirate became a Russian protectorate. During the Russian colonial period, which Bukharan Jews often remembered as a “Golden Age,” the community enjoyed new trading rights and expanded its role as merchants, especially in the textile and cotton industries that were vital to the Russian economy. The community was long renowned for its textile expertise, particularly in fabric dyeing.
The legacy of this period of relative stability is visible in the Grand Nodirbek Hotel’s 19th-century hall, a bright room built in the traditional Central Asian Islamic style but featuring Jewish inscriptions on the walls and a Star of David on the door. Similarly, the Samarkand Regional Studies Museum, which includes a section on Uzbekistan’s Bukharan Jewish history, was the residence of the wealthy Jewish merchant Abram Kalantarov at the turn of the 20th century.
Under Soviet rule, the Bukharan Jews, like other religious groups, were prohibited from participating in religious activities. Many synagogues were destroyed or shut down, publications related to Bukharan Jews were removed from circulation, and prominent cultural figures faced persecution.
Against this backdrop, some 4,000 Bukharan Jews fled the country via Afghanistan before the USSR closed its borders in the late 1930s. During World War II, however, Central Asia saw the arrival of a large number of Ashkenazi Jewish refugees, who fled or were evacuated from Eastern Europe following Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union.
The first major wave of outmigration began in the 1970s, after the Soviet Union lifted restrictions on Jewish emigration. But the Bukharan Jews started leaving en masse amid the Soviet Union’s dissolution in the 1990s, driven by economic opportunities abroad, fears about the potential for increased nationalism, and the pull of chain migration.
As of 1989, Uzbekistan’s Bukharan Jewish population numbered 35,000 people. By 1998, only 3,000 remained. Today, the community is believed to number just a few hundred, mostly elderly residents.
A synagogue without a rabbi
Amid the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ensuing mass emigration, many Bukharan Jews sold their homes. In the decades since, many of these former residences have been converted into hotels, such as the Grand Nodirbek.
When passing through the hotel lobby, visitors see glass doors leading to a sunny courtyard lined with wooden chairs and tables. The hotel manager, Sherzod, offers guided tours of the building and organizes cooking classes on how to make bakhsh, a Bukharan Jewish variation of a rice pilaf popular across Central Asia.
Inside the old Jewish summer halls, Torah inscriptions decorate the walls. The cellar, where families would store food and escape the brutal summer heat, now houses a photo gallery dedicated to Bukharan Jews.
According to Sherzod, the nearby Jewish school offers Hebrew classes and lessons on Jewish history and culture (taught in Russian) to some 450 students, of whom only 14 are Jewish. As part of the tour, he also plays a video about the synagogue next door, which does not have a rabbi and is instead managed by caretaker Abram Iskhakov.
In Samarkand, the Gumbaz Synagogue is also managed by a caretaker rather than a rabbi. In fact, there is only one rabbi who looks after the Bukharan Jewish community across Central Asia, explains Thomas Loy, a research fellow at the Oriental Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences who specializes in Jewish history in Central Asia. The rabbi, Shlomo Babaev, is based in Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s capital. “He also left in the 1990s and got his education in Israel. He returned to Uzbekistan just to make sure there is someone who can speak for those who still live there,” Loy adds.
At the Gumbaz Synagogue, the elderly caretaker greets me in English and then switches to Russian, offering to take my picture in front of the entrance. Although it remains a place of worship, the synagogue is now primarily a tourist attraction.
Only around 12 elderly congregants still attend the synagogue, the caretaker says. A minyan, the quorum required for holding certain Jewish religious obligations and prayers, consists of 10 Jewish adults. These days, the caretaker often spends his time leading tours and ensuring food is kosher for Jewish visitors at a nearby hotel.
At the center of the synagogue’s courtyard stands an apricot tree. On a nearby table, the caretaker dries the picked fruit, which he boils to make apricot kompot, a sweet fruit drink.
The caretaker shows me around the two prayer halls, one of which was used to shelter Ashkenazi Jews during World War II, he says. A calendar hangs on the wall, featuring advertisements in Russian and English for Bukharan Jewish-run clinics, automotive businesses, and matchmaking services in Queens, the New York City borough. Approximately half of the dates on the calendar feature memorials to Bukharan Jews.
The diaspora connection
Today, the vast majority of Bukharan Jews live outside of Central Asia. A large diaspora of about 50,000 lives in Queens, where there are two Bukharan Jewish Community Centers. There is also a large community in Israel, as well as smaller groups spread across Europe, Canada, and Australia.
Diaspora initiatives aimed at preserving cultural heritage include the World Congress of Bukharian Jews, founded by businessman Lev Leviev in 2000; the Congress of Bukharan Jews of the U.S.A. and Canada, founded by businessman Boris Kandov in 1999; and The Bukharian Times, a newspaper published in both Russian and English.
In Uzbekistan, the diaspora plays a particularly important role in maintaining Jewish cemeteries. “Bukharan Jews in Israel and the United States regularly make a pilgrimage to the Jewish cemeteries in Uzbekistan to pray at the graves of their ancestors, and reconnect with their heritage,” explains Alanna Cooper, an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Case Western University.
Because the shrinking of the local community makes it difficult to perform yushvo, a local mourning ritual, conserving and visiting ancestors’ graves has become central to preserving Bukharan Jewish culture. Private initiatives, often organized by members of the diaspora to maintain Jewish cemeteries in their ancestral hometowns, raise money for restoration work and arrange for locals to tend individual graves.
One such organization, the New York-based Charitable Fund Samarkand, has reportedly fundraised $400,000 to reconstruct and renovate Samarkand’s Jewish cemetery. Another organization, the Kattakurgan Memorial Fund, raises money for the restoration and maintenance of the Jewish cemetery in Kattakurgan, a city in the Samarkand region. The Kattakurgan Memorial Fund has also created an online photo gallery and directory, allowing descendants of Bukharan Jews to take a virtual tour of the cemetery grounds and search for their ancestors buried there.
International organizations, such as the World Monuments Fund and UNESCO, have also participated in heritage preservation projects. In 2020, Bukharan Jewish homes were included in World Monuments Watch, a program that calls attention to threatened cultural heritage sites, leading to a project aimed at reducing their risk of deterioration.
However, Sherzod still laments the overall lack of support from the government, UNESCO, and the diaspora in preserving former Jewish homes. “A room that is 420 years old needs to be conserved because early cracks are beginning to form,” the hotel manager explains.
Tracing roots, driving tourism
While Uzbekistan’s Bukharan Jewish community has largely emigrated, interest in their history and heritage appears to be growing. According to Zulya Rajabova, who runs the New York-based Silk Road Treasure Tours and has worked in Uzbekistan’s tourism industry since the 1990s, demand for Bukharan Jewish tours has doubled in recent years. Sherzod also mentioned this trend, explaining that the Grand Nodirbek Hotel receives three tour groups per day during high season.
Uzbekistan liberalized its visa policy in 2018, making it easier for an increasing number of Bukharan Jewish émigrés to visit their ancestral homeland. Many returned for the first time, eager to share their cultural heritage with their families. “Multi-generational trips are becoming popular,” says Rajabova, who frequently helps Bukharan Jews who emigrated from Uzbekistan introduce their children and grandchildren — raised abroad and familiar only with diaspora life — to the culture’s roots in Central Asia.
According to Rajabova, these tourists often tell her, “I want to go to the neighborhood where my ancestors lived, to the cemetery where my grandparents’ grave is [located].” And in many cases, she’s able to make it happen. “I connect them with the Jewish community,” Rajabova explains. “I connect them with the rabbi and say, ‘Can you please make sure to find the name of this person’s grandfather?’”
The company’s tours are also popular among travelers who are not of Bukharan or Jewish heritage, as well as among students and academics studying Uzbekistan’s Jewish history. “It’s not only Jewish people, or people whose ancestors lived in Central Asia,” Rajabova underscores. In her experience, tourists exploring the Silk Road are often drawn to the region’s diverse religions and are particularly interested in local cultural traditions, such as Bukharan Jewish textile-making and Shashmaqom music.
Still, Loy warns that the ties between the Bukharan Jewish diaspora and the small community remaining in Central Asia are steadily diminishing with the passage of time. “The connections with Central Asia will slowly fade because many of those who are born in Israel, Vienna, [or] the United States […] are detached from the Central Asian past.”
With most cultural preservation and development now happening abroad, tourism has become another way to preserve the remaining fragments of Bukharan Jewish heritage in Uzbekistan itself. However, as researchers note, the country’s Jewish historical sites are being turned into tourist attractions “in the absence of living Jewish culture.”
As Cooper writes in her research, the Samarkand Regional Studies Museum has become mainly geared towards tourists, offering a glimpse of “the last vestiges of what was once Samarkand’s vibrant Jewish community” while providing little insight into the community’s history. The Gumbaz Synagogue, with its dwindling congregation, offers tourists a similar experience.
In many ways, this is part of a broader tourism renaissance in Uzbekistan, one that commodifies and simplifies the country’s history for visitors — including, but not limited to, its Bukharan Jewish heritage. “Many of those active in the field of tourism and culture connected to Bukharan Jews don’t really want to show the complexities and the other sides of history,” says Loy. “The main narrative [is that] the Bukharan Jews lived in Central Asia for more than 2,000 years […] and they did not change their culture or religion. Everything was fixed, stable, and they lived through it.”
Nevertheless, Loy believes that the preservation of this cultural heritage will continue “as long as there is interest from the Bukharan Jews outside of Central Asia in their history.” “I don’t think that the Uzbek state is against it because it’s a plus for tourism to have Jewish heritage preserved,” he adds.
Rajabova recalls the story of a man in his 80s who returned to Uzbekistan after being away for 30 years. “My neighborhood remembers me,” he told her, recounting how his former neighbors cooked for him and celebrated his return. With the overwhelming majority of Bukharan Jews now living outside Uzbekistan, tourism and diaspora initiatives help preserve, reinterpret, and stage Bukharan Jewish heritage for visitors, sustaining the community’s memory even as its members pass on.
Hello, I’m Eilish Hart, the editor of The Beet. Thanks for taking the time to read our work! Our newsletter delivers underreported stories like this one to subscribers once a month. Like all of Meduza’s reporting, it’s free to read but relies on support from readers. Please help us keep fighting for independent journalism.
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Story by Sasha Slobodov for The Beet
Edited by Eilish Hart