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: Austria shows another interesting example of the Israeli Diaspora community -«Israeli Sephardi Russians». This group consists of three to four thousand former Soviet Jews that stayed in Austria which was a transit point for Jewish emigration from the USSR to the West in 1970s, or returned there from Israel, as well as of those FSU Jews that joined them in the 1990s. The overwhelming majority of this group is composed of representatives of «oriental» Jewish communities of the (former) Soviet Union - mostly Bukhara, as well as Georgian and, to lesser extent, Caucasian (Mounting) Jews. A significant number or even majority of the Austrian Jewish immigrants with roots in the former USSR spent a certain period of their life in Israel, and thus are Israeli passport holders. As a result «Israeli Sephardi Russians» together with a few hundred «Israeli Ashkenazi Russians» and some two thousands of Israeli passport holders that were born either in Israel or in the Diaspora beyond the FSU, now compose one third to 40% of the Austrian Jewish population (the latter is estimated between 10-12,000, or 15-20,000; according to other sources, 95% of them in the Austrian capital of Vienna, although only 7,014 of them are officially registered as Jewish community members).
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.
Topics: Synagogues, Ethnography, Race, Racism, Ethnicity, Diversity, Pluralism, Conflict, Bukharian Jews, Mountain Jews, Main Topic: Identity and Community
Abstract: The prevalence of anti-Semitism in Russia is well known, but the issue of race within the Jewish community has rarely been discussed explicitly. Combining ethnography with archival research, Jewish Russians: Upheavals in a Moscow Synagogue documents the changing face of the historically dominant Russian Jewish community in the mid-1990s. Sascha Goluboff focuses on a Moscow synagogue, now comprising individuals from radically different cultures and backgrounds, as a nexus from which to explore issues of identity creation and negotiation. Following the rapid rise of this transnational congregation—headed by a Western rabbi and consisting of Jews from Georgia and the mountains of Azerbaijan and Dagestan, along with Bukharan Jews from Central Asia—she evaluates the process that created this diverse gathering and offers an intimate sense of individual interactions in the context of the synagogue's congregation.
Challenging earlier research claims that Russian and Jewish identities are mutually exclusive, Goluboff illustrates how post-Soviet Jews use Russian and Jewish ethnic labels and racial categories to describe themselves. Jews at the synagogue were constantly engaged in often contradictory but always culturally meaningful processes of identity formation. Ambivalent about emerging class distinctions, Georgian, Russian, Mountain, and Bukharan Jews evaluated one another based on each group's supposed success or failure in the new market economy. Goluboff argues that post-Soviet Jewry is based on perceived racial, class, and ethnic differences as they emerge within discourses of belonging to the Jewish people and the new Russian nation.
