Bukharan Jews and the Dynamics of Global Judaism

9 International Jewish Organizations Encounter Local Jewish Community Life

When the Soviet Union dissolved, emigration restrictions lifted and the Jews of Central Asia (like those in the rest of the Soviet Union) began leaving en masse. By 1993, the first time I visited Uzbekistan, the Bukharan Jewish population, which had numbered approximately 35,000 in 1989, had already been reduced to about half that size. In Tajikistan , the rate of emigration was even more dramatic. Following civil war there, the Bukharan Jewish population was reduced from approximately 15,000 to 2,000.1 As immigrants from the USSR began pouring into Israel and the United States, the exuberance that had fueled the Struggle for Soviet Jewry movement was redirected. Whereas Israeli and American Jews had worked to aid Jewish refuseniks during the Soviet era, their energies and monies were now rechanneled toward assisting them in their resettlement process. This project had two dimensions. It involved helping the immigrants adjust to their new lives by working with them on language learning, professional retraining, and navigating bureaucracies. It also involved providing them with a formal Jewish education, which had been denied to them under Soviet rule. Here we return to the story of Torah Academy with which this book opened. Torah Academy was founded by ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews in order to instill the “basic bedrock of belief” in students who had come to the United States supposedly “devoid of everything and anything Jewish .”2 In its effort to reconnect Bukharan Jews to their religious roots and to the Jewish People, Torah Academy was not alone. Many other institunine International Jewish Organizations Encounter Local Jewish Community Life 170 Twentieth-Century Conversations tions with similar goals, including schools, synagogue programs, youth groups, and summer camps, were established in the cities and towns where Soviet émigrés—Bukharan Jewish among them—were resettling. Such institutions were also set up in areas of the former Soviet Union where Jews still remained. Taking advantage of new religious freedoms and possibilities for unrestricted travel into the newly independent states, many nonprofit Jewish organizations established operations in situ to teach those who had not yet immigrated (or who had no plans to immigrate ). In Uzbekistan, these organizations included the Jewish Agency for Israel (Zionist), Bnei Akiva (religious Zionist), Chabad-Lubavitch (ultra-Orthodox), the Joint Distribution Committee (nonsectarian welfare ), and Midrash Sephardi. Although these organizations differ widely in their ideological views about Judaism and Jewish Peoplehood, their work in Uzbekistan has been driven by a common desire to reunite Jews who had long been disconnected from the Jewish world. What was the nature of the interactions between representatives of these international Jewish organizations and the local Jewish population ? And what sort of impact did they have on local Jewish understandings and practices? Thus far, we have explored two historical encounters between Central Asia’s Jews and Jewish emissaries from other parts of the world, one facilitated by Yosef Maman in the late eighteenth century, and the other by Shlomo Lev Eliezerov on the heels of Russian colonialism at the end of the nineteenth century. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, I was presented with an opportunity that simply had not been available to me in the study of these previous encounters: I was able to watch this one unfold. Traveling between Uzbekistan, Israel, and the United States, I collected information about the emissary organizations through discussions with those who worked in their headquarters (in the United States and Israel) as well as with those who were stationed in Uzbekistan, where they worked directly with local Bukharan Jews. In addition to conducting formal interviews and holding informal conversations with these emissaries, I also observed and took part in their classes, seminars, religious rituals, and holiday events. Looking at the work of these organizations from the local perspective, I discussed with Bukharan Jews themselves their impressions of the emissaries, their organizations, their work, and the changes they had initiated. 171 International Jewish Organizations Just as the ethnographic approach differed from the research methods I had used to study previous encounters, so, too, the sorts of questions and issues addressed here differ. Whereas the eighteenth-century reunion was analyzed from a historiographic perspective, and the nineteenth -century one focused on contestation between local and global forms of religious institutional authority, this chapter draws on discussions I had with common people about their ideas, understandings, and feelings about the changes in which they were taking part at this very...