There is not much literature on Jewish necropoleis in the territory of the former Soviet Union and the amount of it dedicated to cemeteries and other types of burials of the non-Ashkenazi Jewish sub-ethnic groups is even less. In fact, we can only cite a number of studies carried out as far back as in the 19th and early 20th centuries on the cemetery in the so called Jehoshaphat Valley in Chufut Kale, the famous Jewish Karaite necropolis in the Crimean Mountains; studies of the Jehoshaphat Valley monuments resumed in the Soviet times after a long pause by the Georgian semitologist Nisan Babalikashvili. He also devoted a number of works to Jewish epitaphs in Transcaucasiai. The untimely passed away scholar certainly occupies a special place in the history of Soviet Hebrew and Jewish Studies. His papers that were published in Georgia, where the attitude towards Jewish issues was relatively liberal, stand out by virtue of their very existence and high proficiency amid the utter lack of any Jewish studies in the former Soviet Union. Today, at long last, already in the post-Soviet period, large-scale researches are being carried out at the same Chufut Kale under the auspice of the International Center for Jewish Education and Field Studies headed by Artem Fedorchuk. Apart from Chufut Kale, the recent discovery by Israeli and Armenian archeologists of a Jewish cemetery dating back to the 14th – 15th centuries, located in the Armenian Highland to the south of Lake Sevan, is worth mentioning.

As far as I know, the above list exhausts all the references on Jewish necropoleis. However, the subject of cemeteries and burials, including the memorial ones, is of considerable importance to Jewish communities in the post-Soviet space. A lot of resources are being spent on maintaining abandoned cemeteries and on erecting monuments in places of mass execution of Jews in the Holocaust. Jews strive to preserve all the graves of their ancestors on the land where they had lived for centuries. Not infrequently, cemeteries become a matter of severe opposition between ultrareligious Jewish groups, secular Jews and temporal authorities. A notorious example of this is the recent scandal around the deteriorating Jewish cemetery in Grodno, Belarus.

Besides, any necropolis is a rich and distinctive source of explicit or implied information on the history, social development, onomastics, arts and other aspects of the life of a group that created it. An in-depth study of necropoleis is quite a complex and painstaking job requiring a lot of time and much skill in processing big amounts of data, making drawings, etc. The work is frequently complicated by the opposition on the part of the graveyard administration or, when it is an abandoned graveyard, on the part of the archeological or town-planning authorities. Sometimes, there are also protests from the religious Jewish establishment. While it may take long before such studies appear, in the meantime, colleagues involved in interfacing problems, or just keen readers, may well be interested in some information, including fragmentary materials. This is why I dared to offer to the publishers of the “Euro-Asian Jewish Yearbook” a number of notes about Jewish necropoleis which I wrote over twenty years ago during ethnographical excursions to the regions of Jewish settlement in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

These records were made in 1985 – 1986 when a voluntary Jewish History and Ethnography Commission founded by a group of ethnographers and historians interested in the development of Jewish studies was active in Moscow. One of the most requested activities of the Commission was the study of the necropoleis of non-Ashkenazi USSR eastern communities. Some of the colleagues jokingly called the subject “Lakhlukhism” (from the ethnicon Lakhlukh, one of the names of Aramaic-speaking Kurdistan Jews). Being an ethnographer by profession, I was also interested in the subject, though I couldn’t have it as an officially approved or major topic of my research program. In those years, I managed to make a number of trips to Dagestan, Abkhazia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. By their character, I would call these trips ethnographical excursions. Usually, the aim of a trip was other than the study of the Jewish population and, therefore, there was no systematic research program for it. What I did was only fragmentary sketches of what I encountered and saw without trying to provide an integral coverage of the ethnographical or social situation. To some extent, the State Security Committee of the USSR (the KGB of sad memory) helped me with these trips by regularly sending me out of Moscow under various excuses during the time when some important Soviet events were held. In 1986, when one of the last Communist Party Congresses was taking place, the KGB, worried that I might somehow upset the agenda of the event, ordered the governance of the Institute of Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR where I worked to send me on a business trip. When they asked me at the Institute where I would like to go, I mentioned Central Asia.

In the case with Dagestan it was different. An all-Union Conference on the Family was to be held there, and since I had worked a lot on the problems of kinship, I filed an attendance request. But this time, the governance of the Institute refused to send me there fearing that I will use the trip for the study of the Dagestan Mountain Jews, which was totally out of the Institute’s research program. I had to take a short-term leave and go to Dagestan on my own in order to partake in the conference and… to get acquainted with the Mountain Jews of the republic.

In Abkhazia I spent several surveying seasons studying the longevity of their population. During my short visits to Sukhumi, the capital town of the then Autonomous Republic, I met local Jews, talked to them and, as was the case in other places, attended cemeteries. Hereafter, you will find abstracts from the field records I kept then.

Derbent

I would like to remind the reader that Derbent, a town located close to the Russia-Azerbaijan boundary, is believed to be the major place of the settlement of Jews. According to the 1989 census, there were about 12 thousand Jews there, which was the largest concentration of Jews in the RSFSR after Moscow and Leningrad. The Derbent Jews spoke a distinct dialect of the Tat Jewish language and mostly lived then in the central part of the town between the Azerbaijani and Russian neighborhoods.

The Derbent Jewish cemetery is located on the southern outskirts of the town, in a 15 to 20-minutes walk from the major bazaar. The cemetery is enormous, you can see it from afar, it looks like a forest of small menhirs. To an unsophisticated observer, it resembles a Muslim cemetery. There is very little greenery there, only in the very center of the cemetery do you see two or three small trees. From north to south, the cemetery is cut by a shallow ravine or a small channel on the either side of which they buried people as far back as in the 19th century. Except for the recent 10 to 20-years-old graves, all the gravestones are upright stelae (מצבה) without any horizontal gravestones. Stelae have engraved inscriptions and, infrequently, a modest ornament. The Magen David appeared as an element of the ornament beginning, approximately, in the 1920s. The design of the ornament changes with time, apparently, representing different teams of cutters.

Until 1940, all the inscriptions, except some very few, are in Hebrew. On the Ashkenazi graves, there are more such exceptions than on the Mountain-Jewish ones. All the stelae are in superior condition, especially those that belong to the semicentenary prior to the Revolution. The texts of the inscriptions are standard:

פ"נ איש תם וחשוב מרדכי בן יוחנן נפטר בשבת ג' בכסליו בשנת... תנצב"ה (an example of the text)
Here lies an honest and distinguished man Mordechai son of Yohanan, Died on Shabbat, 3d of Kislev, year of …, May His Soul be Bound in the Bond of Life.

The poor Hebrew literacy of the cutters or authors of the text is indicated by the fact that in many cases, after the word בשנת (in the year of) the year number is missing.
The earliest graves I discovered were a group of them in the very center of the cemetery on top of a small hill under a strange spreading tree, maybe a fig or an olive. They were small, not-too-high and almost square stelae deeply sunk into the earth. The inscriptions on them were amateurish, roughly engraved, the lines often crooked. The stelae are made of gray rather porous stone; it is hard to make out the inscriptions. The date is 1830. There are ten of them, they are all close to each other, all of the same year, and they differ markedly from the stelae of subsequent decades. The only graves they do resemble are those of the 1830s. Thus, the cemetery has been continuously functioning for almost 180 years.

Among the graves there is at least one decorated with a depiction of Kohens’ fingers and hands folded in a certain way for the course of Birkat Kohanim (Priestly Blessing). The epitaph reads that there lies Yehiel ha-Kohen. This grave is interesting in the context of the occasionally expressed opinion that there were no Levites or Kohens among Mountain Jews, which argues for their proselyte origin. Unfortunately, it is impossible to judge from the text of the epitaph whether the deceased was a Mountain Jew, an Ashkenazi or a Jew of some other sub-ethnic group. Later, however, I did locate the surname Leviev among Mountain Jews. There are quite a few Ashkenazi graves in the cemetery: their proportion is approximately one to ten Mountain-Jewish ones. The graves attracting attention are the graves of the 1918 – 1920 pogroms’ victims with inscriptions indicating how the people were killed, and calling for revenge.

In the last 15 to 20 years, the appearance of the graves has somewhat changed: they began to be made with horizontal gravestones, though they are still without any greenery. Without any exceptions, there are inscriptions in Russian on them, in many cases only in Russian and without the Magen David. There appeared portraits and photos on stone, including the portrait of the famous woman Heroine of Socialist Labor Giulboor Davidova who had lost both her sons in the war. There are even busts there. The gradual change in the appearance of the headstones attended by an evident increase in their cost (a common phenomenon for the Soviet Union , notably, for the Caucasus) is more noticeable among Mountain Jews than among the Ashkenazi. Another phenomenon visible on the graves of the last 10 to 15 years is the decline in Hebrew literacy. What is most indicative is that Jewish names written in Hebrew are now spelled the Tat way. For instance, while on the early stelae the name Livgo (the Tat equivalent of the Biblical name Rivka) is written as רבקה, on the contemporary ones it is spelled ליבגו.

All in all, the cemetery is unique both in the volume of available information and the good condition it is in, and is worth spending several days of an in-deep study. I was only about two hours there.

Sukhumi

Unlike Derbent, the Jewish population of the Abkhazia capital is not large, about 3.5 thousand people, according to the 1989 census, and had appeared there relatively recently. In 1985, most of them were Georgian Jews; there were also Ashkenazi, Mountain Jews from Vartashen (six families) and Krymchaks. There is little known about the history of the Sukhumi Jews and I haven’t encountered any related studies. The relative literature only mentions the existence of a small Jewish community in Sukhumi. I visited the so called “old” Jewish cemetery. According to Sukhumi Jews, it is the chronologically first Jewish cemetery in the town.

As in the case of Derbent, the Sukhumi Jewish cemetery is also located on the southern outskirts of the town. It is not far from the Chanba Street, on the way to the Beslet bridge and to the kolkhoz that then bore the name of Akaki Tsereteli. The Jewish cemetery, as such, is only a small part of the #2 Town Cemetery, where there is also a Christian cemetery. There, the contrast with the Derbent cemetery is stark. There is no specifically “oriental” appearance which is the characteristic feature of the Dagestan necropolis. On the contrary, there is a lot of greenery, on a hillside, the soil is wet with lianas, climbing plants and thorns. All the graves are contemporary, of the common European design, with horizontal gravestones and Russian inscriptions. Most of the graves, notably, the Ashkenazi ones are without any Hebrew inscriptions at all. Flowers are placed or even planted on many of them. The earliest grave I discovered was a Krymchak burial dated 1906, though there is no certainty that it is not a cenotaph.

What surprised me was the greater number of the Ashkenazi and Krymchak graves as compared with the Georgian-Jewish ones. Perhaps, Georgian and Mountain Jews now bury their relatives in the other more recent cemetery, though there are some Georgian-Jewish graves in the first cemetery too. There are many Krymchak graves and they are scattered all over the cemetery. There are no Hebrew inscriptions on the Krymchak graves and almost no Hebrew symbols, except for one or two of the 1940s graves with Magen Davids on them. Some of the graves are fancy and rich, on big fenced lots with stone benches and tables and even with busts. Such is, for instance, the grave of the procurator Kakiashvili. Most of the Georgian-Jewish graves have inscriptions written in Hebrew, as well as in Russian, and in some cases, also in Georgian (the 1940s – 1950s graves sometimes have Hebrew plus Georgian inscriptions with no Russian ones). Virtually, all graves have a depiction of Magen David and the anagram פ"נ (“Here lies”). More than a half of the Ashkenazi graves have no Hebrew insignia. Considering the scarce information available about the Krymchaks, in general, and the almost complete absence of any information about the Sukhumi Krymchaks, in particular, I believe that the cited below list of Krymchak surnames found on the epitaphs of the Sukhumi cemetery might be rather interesting (in parenthesis are the dates of burial or decease):

Bakhshi (1906, 1918, 1918, 1960)
Gotta (1952, 1967)
Gurdzhi (1949, 1950, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1975)
Gurdzhi-Mangupli (1951)
Karakoz (1953)
Khakhmigeri (1960, 1984)
Khondo (1954, 1960)
Levi (1931) [it is not clear whether it is a Krymchak grave or not ]
Lombrozo (1946, 1981)
Makogon- Mangupli (1979)
Mangupli (1931,1933,1942,1944,1970,1971,1973,1974,1975,1976,1977,1978)
Manto (1966, 1970)
Mizrakhi (1932, 1972)
Piastro (1942, 1969)
Purim (1959, 1976)
Tokatli (1950, 1977)

Samarkand

Samarkand is the second city of Uzbekistan in significance and size after Tashkent. In the 1980s it was the most important and populous center of the Bukhara Jews. According to the 1979 census, there were 14.5 thousand Jews in the Samarkand Oblast. Most of them were Bukhara Jews, a Tajik-speaking Jewish sub-ethnic group of Central Asia.ii In Samarkand there was and still is a separate Jewish neighborhood. In Central Asia, a neighborhood of a city occupied by a separate ethnic or social group is designated by the Iranian word makhalya (community). Accordingly, the Jewish neighborhood was called Jewish Makhalya or, informally, Makhalya. Officially, the name was Oriental Community and it was an administrative unit of one of the city’s districts. This was a significant feature since Makhalya always had and still has a certain level of self-administration, recognized by the state, which ensures the maintaining of the Jewish appearance of this part of the city. By the mid-1980s, about half of the Samarkand Jews already lived outside the Makhalya, in the so called new city. However, almost everybody maintained their ties with the Makhalya, one of the reasons being that all the Samarkand Jews went there a few times a week to buy kosher meet from the shochet, or to bring him the cattle or poultry they bought at the bazaar to be slaughtered. The Samarkand Makhalya in those days was presumably the most compact, populous and active center of the oriental Jewry of the USSR.

The northern part of the Oriental Community meets the highway separating the city from the site of the ancient town of Afrasiab where the old pre-Mongolian Samarkand was once situated. Along the other side of the highway, there stretches the famous ensemble – the Shah-e Zindah Tombs. The extension of it is a small Muslim cemetery, and beyond it is the immense Jewish cemetery. This is the Samarkand main Jewish cemetery, and there is one more, on the outskirts of the new city, where they bury, mostly, Ashkenazi, though there are some Ashkenazi graves in the main cemetery as well.

From the highway, a flight of steps leads to the cemetery gateway decorated with bright blue enameled tiles. Right beyond the entrance, are the graves of the famous people of the Makhalya that all its citizens are proud of. Here lies the outstanding singer Levicha Babakhanov, died in 1926, the court vocalist of the Emir of Bukhara. He was the first man in Central Asia, , who recorded his music on a phonograph disc way before the Revolution. It was a big honor since the Emir never allowed him to perform publicly. In this case he said: “Do record your singing, because after you die, your voice will continue to live.” Babakhanov’s burial vault, though an old one, already bears the influence of the European style. On the grave, there is his portrait made from a photograph, or maybe it is a photograph made as a portrait. There are two inscriptions: a large-print Hebrew and a small-print Russian one. The burial vault is in the form of a small mausoleum with a dome and arches. Though, like most of the old burial vaults, it is made of adobe brick, it is fancier than the rest of them; its height is about 2 – 2.5 meters. Next to the mausoleum of Levicha Babakhanov, or to be more exact, around it, there are graves of distinguished people of a later period among whom there are many “granted ones”: The Honoured Artist of the Uzbek SSR, People’s Artiste of the Uzbek and Tadzhik SSRs, People’s Artiste of the USSR, etc. There are graves here of singers and musicians, including some very renowned such as Rafael and Gabriel Tolmasov who descended from the Anusim (who are called here Chala), a family who were forced to embrace Islam. Not far is the grave of another famous Chala, Abraham Abdrakhmanov (who was a minister of the Uzbek government in the 1930s) and his wife. In the same row of graves you notice the grave of the daughter of the writer David Kalantarovich, with an engraved long poem of hers written in the Tajik language. All these graves of the late 1960s and the 1970s are strikingly different from the old graves. They all are large standard black-granite stelae, with the customary photo portraits and only Russian language inscriptions (except for the aforementioned poem in Tajik). Hebrew had disappeared from the gravestones somewhere around the late 1960s – early 1970s. After that time, an inscription in Hebrew was a rare exception. If there is such an inscription, it comes on the horizontal gravestone and not on the stele, on the stele the inscription is in Russian.

You will note that there are no introductory abbreviation פ"נ, characteristic of Ashkenazi gravestones. The Hebrew inscriptions, including the old ones, give the full version of פה נטמן איש צדיק... (here lies the honest man…) instead of the usual abbreviated one.

The place near the entrance was always considered the most honorable in the cemetery. But recently, the community had built at their own expense a big fine War Memorial at the other far end of the cemetery. It depicts a grieving woman inclined before a high stele. On the steps leading to the figure there is an engraved inscription in Russian. Now, the most honorable place on the cemetery is next to this memorial. In the Makhalya, there is competition and buy-and-sell activities in regard to the prestigious places in the cemetery. Among the recent graves, a good many of them are graves of young people killed in the battles of the Soviet Army (a special small alley) and those perished as a result of accidents or murders. Some of the killed were drug-traffic mafiosi. In general, the Makhalya natives regardless of where they live, be it the “new city” or any other city, e.g. Dushanbe, want to be buried in this cemetery.

Close to the main entrance, to the left of it, there is a rather big space for corpse-washing and funeral service. It is a plot walled off on three sides and with a roof covering about one third of its area. On the ground, there are concrete tiled platforms resembling bath benches. On the walls, there are several marble plates immortalizing, in good Hebrew, the names of people who donated for the construction of this facility. There is no Russian text there. In 1986, corpse-washing was done by a history teacher from a Makhalya school.

The oldest graves I saw belong to the first decade of the 20th century.iii They all are situated close to the entrance, to the left of it. Farther inward from the highway, there stretch almost infinite ranges of graves, all laid of yellowish-brown adobe brick with upright marble slabs fixed in it. The architecture of the graves is quite diverse and it hasn’t got that standard appearance which is the case in Derbent. Prevalent are squat small domed shrines from 1.5 meters or even shorter to 2 to 3 meters in height. Some are originally looking three-, four- or even five-step square-in-plan pyramids narrowing to the top. There were Russian inscriptions virtually on every grave I saw but on the oldest ones they were limited only to dates of birth and death with the names of months written in Russian. Later, the Russian and Hebrew inscriptions became even in number and eventually Russian inscriptions ousted the Hebrew ones. Inscriptions in the Bukhara Jewish language I found only on one or two graves of the 1920s. On one of the stelae the inscription was in Latin letters.

Quite unexpected and amazing was the abundance of carved decorations on old graves. Most of the stelae have, engraved in stone, drawings of some shrines against the background of a landscape. These drawings resemble primitivistic Muslim and Jewish pictures of “holy places” that one often sees in the homes of local residents. In this case, artists, most likely, wanted to depict Jerusalem or other holy places. On a number of stelae, I noticed fancy and sophisticated engraved ornaments (in “oriental style”) around the inscriptions.

Though having changed and become less spread, the tradition did not disappear altogether. A sample of it is a primitivistic depiction of a fatal road accident: on the left you can see a car rammed into a post, with a tramcar of a trolleybus in the center of the composition, and houses on the right. When looking at the engraving, one can sense the continuity of the earlier tradition of depicting holy places.

In the opposite to the entrance of the cemetery end, not far from the granite shop, in a barren and, undoubtedly, second-rate-in-the-past part of the cemetery (though its rating must have gone up thanks to the proximity to the War Memorial) there is situated the “Ashkenazi Corner” where the oldest graves go back to wartime. There are not many Ashkenazi graves, only a few dozen of them, and they are separated from the main cemetery by an empty space. Interestingly, among them there is one grave of a Bukhara Jew (judging by his name). This may be explained by the nearby graves of women with typically Russian names and surnames. Most likely, the man had been married to a Russian woman (he died in the 1950s) and he, his wife and her relatives were buried in a less honorary Ashkenazi “corner”.

In the early 1980s, the community managed to obtain the permission of the Municipal Council for expanding the territory of the cemetery. However, the situation, on the whole, has not been resolved since the cemetery is located on the territory of the Afrasiab Archaeological Park which is a UNESCO world heritage site. The expansion of archaeological or restoration activities at the Afrasiab site may lead to the destruction of the Jewish necropolis.

* * *

Even these short fragmentary descriptions of the three Jewish cemeteries enable us to draw certain conclusions and note some regular patterns. Some of them are quite trivial. For instance, all the three cemeteries give evidence of a gradual disappearance of old-type burials and the leveling of all new tombstones according to a certain average “Soviet” type. In all the three cases, the Hebrew inscriptions either disappear or become scarce. If you ever visited a Jewish cemetery in European Russia or in the western SIC republics, you will know that this phenomenon is characteristic not only and no so much of eastern Jewish groups but, still to a greater extent, of the Ashkenazi. There are many reasons for this but the main reason is, surely , the increasing departure of Jews from the religious tradition, disregard of burial norms and customs, in other words, the increasing acculturation involving the entire Soviet Jewry in the post-war period. As we can see, this process, maybe to a less degree, still affected all the eastern Jews. You will note that on the graves of Georgian Jews, who have mostly maintained their devotion to the Jewish religious traditions, there are, nevertheless, inscription in Russian, the language many of them could only barely speak. Among the reasons for the disappearance of Hebrew inscriptions, we can cite the reduction in number of people in command of Hebrew basics, as well as the expensiveness of such inscriptions.
It is noteworthy that, virtually, nowhere spoken Jewish languages (in this case, Tat, Tajik, Jewish, Georgian and Yiddish to an extent) are used in epitaphs. This is in full conformity with the low, or pejorative, status of spoken languages in the Jewish linguistic culture. Traditionally, spoken languages were considered to be the low level of culture or spirituality. As is known, in the 19th and 20th centuries, the situation started to transform and spoken Jewish languages became, in some cases, tools of cultural policy or, even, of the change in identification. It will suffice to mention the turbulent fate of the Yiddish language and all the discussions about its role in the Jewish life that took place up to World War II and, even, after it. It was Yiddish that was used by the Soviet propaganda in opposition to “bourgeois” Hebrew. Tat language was, certainly, used as a tool for the “dejudaization” of Mountain Jews which I have mentioned in the present article. In various historical situations, Jewish spoken languages obtained high prestigious statuses. But what is essential in this context is that the cemetery and funeral rites become the dernier resort for everyday Jewish religious culture. It did not experience the shift from the supreme to the inferior and the status changes that were raging in the secular Jewish life. The spoken languages maintained their pejorative status and neither Yiddish nor Tat or any other language had noticeably found their way into the grave epitaphs. Instead of them it was Russian, the language of the empire and the official language of the country, that had intruded everywhere.

All the three cemeteries give evidence of another regularity that you will see at other Jewish cemeteries: the graves of different Jewish sub-ethnic groups occupy, as a rule, different clusters within the same necropolis. Furthermore, in some cases these clusters may be ranged according to a certain prestige pattern. Thus, in Samarkand, the Ashkenazi “corner” was obviously second-rate and those members of the local community who demonstrated deviant forms of social behavior (notably, cross marriages) were also “moved out” there. The existence of such clusters may give some ground for cautious historical conclusions. Thus, it seems likely that it was the Krymchaks who were the first Jews to settle in the early 1900s in Sukhumi, though it has to be verified by archive and the Civil Registry Office data.

There is also evidence in favor of the diffused opinion that the Jewish tombstones are, at the same time, monuments of folk art. According to D. Goberman, “engraved tombstones… are the artistic creativity realm that belongs to the past”.iv The available data on eastern Jewish cemeteries make it possible to assert that ,at least, among eastern Jewish communities this type of creativity was still common 10 to 15 years ago and it is reasonable to suppose that it exists even now. It's another matter that this kind of creativity manifests itself not only as high folk art but also in the form of kitsch. However, it doesn’t diminish, in the least, the significance of such monuments since it is kitsch that often liberates the creative potential of the people.

It is hard to say what has happened to all these cemeteries of late. During the last ten years that passed since I wrote my observations, Sukhumi went through a destructive war, its Jewish community first ran away and then gathered together to make their exodus to Israel. After the war, when it seemed no Jews were left in Sukhumi, it turned out that a small community of several hundred people had revived there. However, there were no Georgian Jews among them at all and it was the Mountain Jews who played the determining role in it, as well as Ashkenazi and several Krymchak families. Nobody knows what happened to the cemetery: most likely, it had fallen to desolation since a great number of graves turned out to be non-attended. The Derbent community has also lived, and is still living, through hard times, characterized by the mass escape exodus to Israel and to the interior of Russia, and by the aggravation of criminality directly affecting the Mountain Jewish communities. No less than half the Derbent community left the town during the past decade. For the first time ever, the town has no rabbi. One may suppose that the cemetery is also falling to desolation, since the number of not-attended graves is growing and the number of people capable of servicing funeral rites according to Jewish tradition is getting smaller.

No less dramatic are the changes in the Jewish part of Samarkand. Today, the Jewish population of the city is very small, because in the 1990s most of them left for the USA, Israel and for some other countries, including Austria and Germany. The Makhalya is now deserted, there are only a few Jewish families left huddling there and a synagogue, but soon even these last traces of the once-existed Jewish community will vanish. In Queens, NYC, there appeared, as if having been transferred there, the Samarkand Makhalya endeavoring to continue their community traditions in the USA. I guess there is now a Bukhara-Jewish cemetery in New York, an affiliate of the Samarkand one.

 

Today, one may suppose that the danger impending over the cemetery because of its proximity to the Afrasiab site is not as acute as it was before,since, in these worrying times, the Uzbek Republic has a lot more urgent problems to tackle than do archaeological excavations, But the danger of desolation of the Samarkand necropolis is still there. Although there are, virtually, no new burials in the cemetery, the international, Russian and the USA Bukhara-Jewish organizations continue to support the Samarkand Jewish cemetery as a significant monument of their heritage.