Published: 17 September 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Among the last Jews of Bukhara (Tablet)
CHANCES ARE THAT the great majority of Jews who will ever call Bukhara, Uzbekistan, home are dead. But in cemeteries in the Russian-speaking world, the residents feel less dead than they really are.
The faces of the deceased are often etched onto their tombstones in detailed low relief, turning a graveyard into a portrait gallery, a pantheon of people who did nothing more or less heroic than live out their allotted time.
The lively graves at the Jewish cemetery in Bukhara, an ancient and shadeless expanse announced by its turquoise-domed gatehouse, offer a bit of consolation for having to visit dead Jews in the absence of live ones.
There are men in embroidered Bukharan skullcaps, smiling women in bangles and beads, Red Army officers lavished in medals and bars. There are long-beards and no-beards; graves with menorahs and graves with sickles and hammers.
The Bukharan Jewish cemetery tells the story of a community that weathered a tumultuous 20th century. At its start, Bukhara was an independent emirate that had shrewdly resisted Russian domination.
By its end, the Soviet experiment had come and gone, and Uzbekistan—a word that would have been entirely unfamiliar to most of the people buried here—was under one of the most brutish and vacuous dictatorships of any post-Soviet state.
The Jews of Bukhara were never violently liquidated, but they didn’t really have an easy run of things either.
Photo: Synagogue in Bukhara (Tablet)
