On 22 June 2026 it will be 85 years since Nazi Germany's assault on the Soviet Union. The Great Patriotic War that followed took millions of lives and demanded of every people courage, endurance and self-sacrifice. From the very first day the defenders of the homeland included every nationality of the USSR — and among them some 20–25 thousand Bukharan Jews. Many were decorated with orders and medals for outstanding courage; many never returned home, giving their lives for the victory over Nazism.
One of those heroes was Isak Emmanuilovich Abdurakhmanov, a holder of the Order of the Red Star. He lived only nineteen years. He was born on 28 May 1924 in the town of Kerki in the Turkmen SSR, into the large family of Emmanuel and Yaffa Abdurakhmanov, who were raising six children. In 1936 his father died suddenly. Left on her own, his mother returned with the children to relatives in Kokand; some of the children were temporarily placed with kin or in state homes, but the family held together.
Their relatives in Kokand helped them survive the hardest years, and later the family moved to Fergana. Like many of his contemporaries, Isak began working early: before the war he was a weaver at the Fergana textile factory. When the Great Patriotic War broke out he was seventeen. According to family memory, the young man even altered his age in documents in order to volunteer for the front.
In August 1942 he was called up into the Red Army. Bravery, resolve and a natural gift for leading others earned him the rank of sergeant and the command of a rifle squad in the 457th Rifle Regiment of the 129th Rifle Division. In the summer of 1943 the division took part in the Battle of Kursk. In the fight for Height 240.2 near Bolshoy Malinovets, Abdurakhmanov's squad was the first of its platoon to rise in the attack under a storm of artillery and machine-gun fire, broke into the German trenches and closed in hand-to-hand combat. Isak himself killed several enemy soldiers.
For his courage he was decorated with the Order of the Red Star on 29 July 1943. A few days later, on 3 August 1943, Isak Abdurakhmanov was killed in the fighting on the Orel sector. He was nineteen years old. For many years the family knew only that Isak had not returned from the war — the details of his last battle remained unknown. Only decades later, thanks to opened archives, was it possible to reconstruct his combat path and to find the mass grave of the defenders of the homeland, which has survived to this day.
The family have inscribed Isak Abdurakhmanov's name on the memorial to soldiers of the Great Patriotic War at the Ashdod cemetery. Nephews have been named in his honour — among them Yitzchak (Izya) Imanuel, today a recognised leader of the Bukharan Jewish community of Ashdod. As long as the Abdurakhmanov-Imanuel family tell their children and grandchildren the story of the young sergeant who was first to rise in the attack at Kursk, Isak Emmanuilovich Abdurakhmanov goes on living — in the memory of his kin and of his people.
