DUSHANBE, Tajikistan — Even during Sabbath services on a Saturday in early March, as Rabbi Mikhail Abdurakhimov read Hebrew prayers and the faithful followed along using Russian transliterations, the rumble of construction was distracting, the New York Times reports (with thanks: Albert).
This is a synagogue in its last moments of existence. While the congregants prayed, a bright orange bulldozer growled outside, continuing its work at the synagogue's edge.(..)
Judaism's declining influence in this region can be seen as this synagogue lives out its final days.
About 12,000 Jews left Dushanbe after the Soviet Union's collapse, encouraged, perhaps, by Islamic nationalism during a bloody civil war, from 1992 to 1997. "If they could fight among themselves like that, as if against a different nation or religion, what might they do to us?" Mr. Abdurakhimov said.
Most of the several hundred remaining Jews are elderly, and nearly all have relatives in Israel, Germany or the United States.
Julian Chilmodina, born in Volgograd, Russia, in 1931, was among many thousands of Ashkenazi Jews who moved to Central Asia during World War II, joining Persian-speaking Bukharian Jews who had settled in the region much earlier.
Now he wants to move to Israel, where his younger brother lives. In a bizarre twist reminiscent of Soviet times, he cannot get a visa, he says, because his official ethnicity is Russian, rather than Jewish.
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