(Jewish Group) For centuries, Jews thrived in Khujand, Tajikistan. Now the city's last Jew has died.
For many centuries, the city of Khujand in Tajikistan, a mountainous Muslim-majority country, had been a center of Jewish presence in Central Asia.
But the once-rich communal life of Bukharan Jews in Khujand ended last week with the passing of the city’s last remaining Jewish person: Jura Abaev died Jan. 15 at the age of 93, Radio Free Europe reported Thursday.
The Bukharan Jews are a regional minority with Persian roots.
A retired factory worker, Abaev had served as the spiritual leader of Khujand’s synagogue, which according to the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress had closed down in 1999. He was a respected and well-known resident in the city of about 200,000. His neighbors called him “Jura Ako,” meaning “older brother” in the local dialect.
Abaev had five children, all of whom left the country for Israel in the 1990s, along with virtually all of Abaev’s other relatives.
A few dozen Jews, many of them Ashkenazi, still live in the capital of Dushanbe, situated about 150 miles south of the northern city of Khujand, one of the region’s oldest with a 2,500-year-old history.
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