DUSHANBE, TAJIKISTAN — Tucked inside an alleyway, flanked by steep cement walls, is a vivid blue door. It’s not locked; it opens when you touch it. Inside, woven into the carpeted floors and the beautifully gardened courtyard are the last threads of a thousand years of Jewish history in this small Central Asian country.
On several dusky Friday evenings last summer, only four people came to Shabbat dinner at this modest synagogue: Ilya, a visiting elderly man who grew up in Tajikistan but now lives in Uzbekistan; Ura, who had moved back here from the United States; Jamshaid, the groundskeeper and me, in Tajikistan for the summer on a reporting fellowship.
I had stumbled on the synagogue for the first time the summer before, when I was studying Persian in the country. I learned then that the Jewish population in the country had declined dramatically since the Soviet Union.
Tajikistan was once home to tens of thousands of Jews—most of them Bukharan or Ashkenazi from other parts of the Soviet Union. But since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, that population has rapidly declined. Now, the number is in the dozens.
“I love this country. [But] even I don’t want to live here,” says Ura, despite having recently moved back to Tajikistan because of loneliness after his children grew up and his wife left.
On a mountain at the edge of town is a Jewish cemetery. It is well maintained, and includes hundreds if not thousands of graves. It is rare to see a pebble on one. The cemetery stands as a visual reminder of what the community once was.
Creating Tajikistan
One Shabbat, after prayer and a sip of homemade wine, Ilya brought out food that he had cooked himself: fish, chicken and pilaf.
Pilaf, or osh in Tajik Persian, is one of the most beloved dishes in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan— so ubiquitous that the most common word for restaurant, oshkhaneh, could be directly translated as pilaf-house. While Tajik pilaf is brown and oily, Ilya’s—which he described as “Jewish pilaf”—was green and full of herbs.
“This pilaf has a three-thousand-year history,” he told me.
According to some legends, the Bukhara Jewish community is descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel, which would put its age just shy of three thousand years. Many historians date the community as having emerged a few centuries later, with the Persian conquest of Babylon. Cyrus the Great allowed Jews to return to Israel, but many stayed in the lands that made up Persia, which included much of modern-day Central Asia.
Khujand, a city in the fertile Fergana Valley, is the Tajik city that has had a Jewish population for the longest continuous period. Khujand itself is ancient: it has been inhabited for the last 2,500 years and has been ruled by such Greats as Cyrus and Alexander. Khujand’s Jewish population is believed to have originated with Silk Road traders in the Middle Ages.
Tajikistan is a young country. For centuries, the kingdom of Bukhara stretched across the mountainous middle section of Central Asia. Most of the population lived in modern-day Uzbekistan, with smaller communities spread throughout current-day Tajikistan.
Joseph Stalin created Tajikistan with lines on a map in the 1920s, carving a Persian-speaking nation out of the Turkic Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. A long-standing weekly market gave the new country’s capital its name—Dushanbe, which means “Monday” in Persian.
Pre-Soviet Dushanbe was a village of only a few thousand, but it had a small Jewish population, as well as a synagogue and a Jewish cemetery. To populate their new capital, the Soviets encouraged migration into the new Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), and thousands flowed across the permeable border to work, particularly from Uzbekistan. Southern Uzbek cities, like Bukhara and Samarkand, were full of Persian speakers and opportunities were plentiful in Dushanbe. Among the migrants were thousands of Bukharan Jews.
During and after World War II, even more Bukharan and Ashkenazi Jews arrived—some of them refugees, others seeking employment opportunities in infrastructure projects. Both communities built their own separate synagogues and maintained a large Jewish cemetery. In total, about 15,000 Jews lived in the Tajik Republic before the fall of the Soviet Union. Throughout the Soviet period, there were three synagogues in Tajikistan: two in Dushanbe and one in the Northern city of Khujand.
From 1990-2001, more than 10,000 Tajik Jews immigrated to Israel, while a smaller number went to the United States. The end of the Soviet Union drove this trend in two ways. Between 1989-1991, hundreds of thousands of Jewish people immigrated from former Soviet Union countries to Israel as the former collapsed and long-standing restrictions on emigration eased. Then in 1992, civil war broke out in Tajikistan, driving mass emigration of all segments of society. By the end of the 1990s, the community was in steep decline.
Civil War
On a serene morning in 2024, I sat on the synagogue’s steps while the groundskeeper, Jamshaid, watered the garden. Jamshaid is a quiet man, but he could talk for hours about history. He has worked at the synagogue for two years. Before that, he lived in Lviv, Ukraine.
“I have seen three wars: Ukraine, Chechnya and the Tajik Civil War,” Jamshaid said. It was a passing thought, followed quickly by a description of the ancient city of Hisor, which the government had recently invested millions into restoring.
Older Tajiks are haunted by war and separation. The fall of the Soviet Union was followed by five years of civil war, from 1992 to 1997. Former Soviet elites from different parts of the country attacked each other, each trying to gain power over the people and resources of Tajikistan. As the factions in the North and South killed thousands, the mountainous eastern Pamir region, which had a different language and religion from the fighting elites, launched a separatist movement.
Casualty estimates vary, with some saying that up to 150,000 people died. Another 600,000 fled to Afghanistan, and more than a million were internally displaced. Memories of that time are traumatic. Toward the end of the bloody war, the Russian military came in to support Emomali Rahmonov, a southern politician who had named himself president in 1994. Rahmon, who has since de-Russified his name by dropping the -ov, is president to this day.
The war ended in 1997. By that time, thousands of Jews had fled the country. “When the Soviet Union fell apart and civil war broke out in Tajikistan, there was a special effort by the Israeli government to evacuate all the Jewish population,” says Zeev Levin, an expert on Central Asian Jewish history based in Israel. “Over the course of two months, there were more than forty special aircraft flights carried out to evacuate all the community.”
Even after the civil war ended, the violence did not stop. In 1998, armed intruders broke into 71-year-old Meirkhaim Gavrielov’s house and strangled him to death with metal wire. Gavrielov was a journalist and one of the leaders of the Bukharan Jewish community in Tajikistan. He was one of at least fifty journalists killed in the country during the 1990s, according to a Human Rights Watch document from the time. Local law enforcement called the death a suicide. While he was likely targeted as a journalist and not as a Jew, his death shook the community. More people fled.
A self-fulfilling cycle had begun. People left the country, and others followed their family members. Over time, all the rabbis and Jewish butchers left. Without access to kosher meat, more people left to places where it was easier to be observant. Eventually, there were so few Jews, it was hard to form a minyan.
Ilya, who was staying temporarily in one of the synagogue’s guest rooms when I visited, suggested that today, despite the legacy of the Civil War, day-to-day issues figured just as prominently in the shrinking of the community today. “War has come and left,” says Ilya. “Life is not like war.” The war had driven people away in the 1990s, but the war had been over for decades now. After the war ended, new problems emerged for the community.
The Last Synagogues
After Shabbat dinner on this particular night, the men cleared the plates and then watched TV over tea and sugar-coated almonds. The show was Zhdi Menya, or Wait for Me, a long-running Russian reality show that finds and reconnects lost family members. They talked over it, describing an old plot in which two twin brothers, separated by war, reunited after decades. When they reunited, their lives were almost unrecognizable to each other. While both had gotten married and had kids, one had made aliyah, while the other had stayed put.
In 2004, President Rahmon announced a plan to tear down Dushanbe’s last synagogue, which had been standing for over a century. He planned to build a new presidential palace and a nationalist park in the neighborhood where the synagogue was.
The government had already torn down the mikvah and several classrooms when, facing an international outcry, they announced a temporary pause on the demolition. The plan was suspended for several years but was finally carried out in 2008. Now, a presidential palace rises where the synagogue once stood.
“It is painful to lose something very dear, something that cannot be valued in money terms,” a Dushanbe Rabbi, Mikhail Abdurakhmanov, told Reuters at the time.
Just when all seemed lost, Hasan Asadullozoda—owner of airlines and brother-in-law of the president—swooped in to help. The Muslim businessman donated a house he owned to the Jewish community to use as a new synagogue. That house was the place I visited in 2024.
Tajikistan Today
Today, that new synagogue is the only one remaining in the country. (Khujand’s synagogue was destroyed in 2015 to build a shopping mall.) Behind its blue walls, it has gardens, a kitchen, places for people to sleep, and a prayer space decorated with images of the community’s former leaders.
A picture of Asadullozoda hangs on the wall in the main social space. Nailed high above a couch and below a photo of the Western Wall, the portrait is one of the first things you see when you enter the complex.
Underneath Asadullozoda’s smiling face, the men drink tea, watch TV, clean the synagogue, and talk about days past. The community maintains the Jewish cemetery and gives outsiders tours of the synagogue when asked.
I only met another woman there once, when she visited for Shabbat dinner, and she said she had not been there in several years. She declined to be interviewed for this story. When I asked why there were not more women, Ilya seemed surprised.
“This is a place of praying. Why would there be women?” he asked. Of course, I had been welcomed in, given an in-depth tour, and repeatedly invited back, often by Ilya himself. Women were not banned, they were just baffling to him.
Ilya tells me the last time he heard of the synagogue being able to form a minyan in Dushanbe was before COVID. Even then, it was made up of people returning to visit, not people who currently lived there.
“Tajikistan is a hard place to live, not only politically, but economically,” says Zeev Levin. “And there are so many opportunities elsewhere. Contrary to the Tajik population, Jews can travel and receive immigration visas from so many places.”
Tajikistan is one of the poorest countries in Asia and the most remittance-dependent country in the world, but it has limited passport power. Tajik citizens have visa-free access to most of the former Soviet Union, but require visas in advance of arrival to 125 countries. Work visas to places like the US and EU are limited and hard to come by.
Khujand, once home to Tajikistan’s oldest Jewish community, buried its last Jewish resident, Jura Abaev, in 2021, according to reporting by Radio Free Europe. He joined over a thousand in the Khujand Jewish cemetery. At his funeral, his Khujandi friends thanked him for his presence in their lives. There was no one left to say the Kaddish.
On my last day in Tajikistan, Ura told me to look around. Everyone was old, he pointed out.
“If we pass away, in five, ten years, there will be no more Jewish people here,” he said.
Top image: The main worship space of the new synagogue in Tajikistan (All photos credit to ).