Abstract: Established in 1843, the Jewish residential quarter in Samarkand (located at the time in the Bukharan kingdom, and today in independent Uzbekistan) has been emptied of its Jewish residents in the wake of the Soviet Union’s demise. Since then, physical markers testifying to their history in the neighbourhood have also been eroding. This process has been organic, rather than a deliberate program of erasure. Still, these shifts in the built environment fit within Uzbekistan’s larger project of state-building, as Jewish homes and communal structures belie the Russian and Soviet colonial legacy, which has been spurned since independence. Drawing on recent and historical accounts, as well as my own observations in the 1990s and in 2013, this article documents the built environment in the very moment of transition, as physical structures transform and are separated from the history and memories that enlivened them. With this disappearance, a tourist opportunity for encountering global Jewish diversity is lost, and Uzbekistan’s project of nation-building – absent its historical minority populations – is further solidified.
Abstract: Настоящая книга представляет собой попытку обобщающего исследования
социально-демографического развития еврейского населения бывшего СССР
за истекшее столетие, включая динамику численности и расселения по
республикам и городам, этноязыковой состав, половозрастную и семейную
структуру, рождаемость и смертность, уровень образования,
профессиональную структуру, участие в советской политической системе и
эмиграцию в другие страны. В частности, рассматривается влияние
Катастрофы, как на общую численность еврейского населения, так и на его
социально-экономическую структуру. Большое внимание в книге уделяется
представительству евреев среди студентов, специалистов и научных
работников бывшего СССР.
Книга предназначена для демографов, социологов, историков и всех
интересующихся данной проблемой. Многие статистические материалы,
представленные в книге, публикуются впервые.
Abstract: Свадебные ритуалы бухарских евреев описываются в статье по материалам полевых исследований автора, проведенных в Узбекистане, Израиле и СȀА в период с 1991 года. Автор предлагает не столько законченный и самодостаточный монтаж, сколько многоплановые кадры из частной жизни, указывая на пересечения между социальной структурой и человеческой деятельностью, между унаследованными традициями и новаторскими изменениями. Рассматриваются шесть празд- неств из серии бухарско-еврейских свадебных практик: ши-ринхори - поедание сладостей, олицетворяющее помолвку; утвержденная советской властью гражданская свадебная цере-мония в ЗАГСе; кош-чинон - празднество, когда родственники невесты принимают участие в отдалении, пока происходит приведение в порядок волосков на ее лице; праздники кудо- бини и домот-дророн, которые проводятся во внутреннем дворе родительского дома невесты и означают приветствие жениха и его семьи в доме невесты; кидуш - религиозная свадебная церемония. Автор приходит к выводу, что не существует статичной базовой формы бухарско-еврейской культуры, отклонения от которой или изменения внутри которой могут быть опознаны.
Abstract: Before 1991, approximately 60,000 Central Asian Jews lived in Uzbekistan. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, their centurieslong history in the region underwent dramatic changes. The lifting of emigration restrictions coupled with fear of economic chaos, political instability, growth of national movements and a rise in antisemitism, provoked massive Jewish emigration. Today, only about 4,000 Central Asian Jews remain in Uzbekistan. The others have emigrated primarily to the United States, Israel and Austria. The following piece is about the Central Asian Jews who still live in Samarkand, Uzbekistan's second largest city. Today, about one thousand—only ten percent of the city's former community—remain there. Those who have stayed have all watched while relatives and friends have packed their belongings, sold their homes and left the country. They have witnessed the community structure crumble and they have seen the city's old Jewish quarter been sold off, house by house, to outsiders. Today, they are each faced with the question: What is home and where is it now? The work is fiction, informed by an anthropological perspective. The narrative was woven from ethnographic data that I collected during field work among the Central Asian Jews in Samarkand.
Abstract: Since the late 1980s, one of the world's largest Jewish populations has faced a unique dilemma: at the very time it has gained unprecedented freedoms, Soviet and post-Soviet Jewry has encountered political uncertainty, economic instability, and resurgent antisemitism. Jews in the former Soviet Union have been a population teetering simultaneously on the edge of decline and revival, and have had to decide whether to take advantage of the new opportunity to revive Jewish life and rebuild Jewish communities, live in the newly established states but disappear as Jews, or abandon their former homes and emigrate to Israel or elsewhere. Jewish Life after the USSR is the first book to study post-Soviet Jewry in depth. Its careful analyses of demographic, cultural, political, and ethnic processes affecting an important post-Soviet population also give insights into larger developments in the post-Soviet states.
Contents:
Introduction Jewish Life after the USSR: A Community in Transition Zvi GitelmanI. Jews and the Soviet Regime1. Religion, Israel, and the Development of Soviet Jewry's National Consciousness, 1967-1991 Yaacov Ro'i2. Nationalities Policy, the Soviet Regime, the Jews, and Emigration Theodore H. FriedgutII. Politics and Identity3. Thinking about Being Jewish in Russia and Ukraine Zvi Gitelman4. E Pluribus Unum? Post-Soviet Jewish Identities and their Implications for Communal Reconstruction Valery Chervyakov, Zvi Gitelman Vladimir Shapiro5. Russian Jews in Business Marshall I. Goldman6. Russian Antisemitism, 1996-2000 Robert J. BrymIII. Reconstructing Jewish Communities7. The Widening Gap Between Our Model of Russian Jewry and the Reality (1989-1999) Martin Horwitz8. From Leadership to Community: Laying the Foundation for Jewish Community in Russia Sarai Brachman Shoup9. Feasting, Memorializing, Praying, and Remaining Jewish in the Soviet Union: The Case of the Bukharan Jews Alanna Cooper10. The Revival of Academic Studies of Judaica in Independent Ukraine Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern11. Demography of the Jews in the Former Soviet Union: Yesterday and Today Mark ToltsIV. Jews and Russian Culture12. Jewish Converts to Orthodoxy in the Contemporary Period Judith Deutsch Kornblatt13. Jewish Artists in Russian Art: Painting and Sculpture from the 1960s to the 1990s Musya Glants14. Constructing Jewish Identity in Contemporary Russian Fiction Mikhail Krutikov.
