A one-hour interview about his parents and Samarkand.
Yosef's memoir
1998
In Memory
Names of the departed, anniversaries and photographs preserved in the family archive.
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Hananya Ustoniyazov
ז״ל
1900 — 1980 | ה׳תש״ם
He was born in Samarkand into a religious family. His father Baruch belonged to the Pinhasov dynasty — a hereditary line of master fabric-dyers. The Muslim community called their great-grandfather «usto-Niyaz» (Master Niyaz), and from that came the family name Ustoniyazov. His mother Rachel came from the Baturov family. Before Rachel, Baruch had been married to Sorah Tahalova of Bukhara, who died in a typhus epidemic, leaving behind a son, Zion, and a daughter, Malko. Rachel bore Baruch two sons: Hananya and Neriah. As a boy Hananya attended the «khomlo» — the elementary religious school — growing up diligent, quick-witted and a pillar for his parents.
In the early 1920s, after the Basmachi pogrom in Kokand, refugees poured into Samarkand. Among them was the family of the wealthy Chaim ha-Kohen Aulov, who had been murdered in the pogrom. His wife Ester barely escaped with her young children. Thirteen-year-old Ksio (Bloriya) was soon orphaned and became Hananya's destined bride: they married in 1922. Hananya grew tall and strong; God gave him boundless physical strength. He was one of the four heroes of «Bogi Podshohi» — the celebrated masters of the «Kurash» wrestling — who protected their fellow Jews from the multi-ethnic surroundings. This is recorded in the diary of his brother Neriah.
Under Soviet rule Hananya finished driving school and joined the first cohort of young drivers in Samarkand. In 1929, when Dushanbe received city status and was renamed Stalinabad, Hananya moved there with his wife and two children to work in the rapidly developing republic. He soon became a foreman, then a fleet chief, and in 1934 the People's Commissariat of Transport appointed him head of a freight motor depot. Called up in 1941, he was pulled from the troop train at the last minute by a special order and sent as an instructor to a school training tractor and truck drivers for the front.
After the war Hananya returned to the faith of his fathers and became a deeply religious man. He left the driving trade — first running a silk-cocoon workshop, then a wooden-trunk workshop in the Surkhandarya region. In Termez he opened a building-materials store at the town bazaar next to the tea-house; Uzbeks and Tajiks adored him for his fluency in their languages, his poetic mind and his fearless conversations about the greatness of the Old Testament. In 1963 the atheist regime could not forgive his open religiosity — a fabricated case ended in a sentence «for shamanism, agitation to open a synagogue, and ideological corruption of Soviet youth». His eldest son Ilyauhaim filed an appeal, travelled to Moscow, and secured his father's early release.
Hananya returned to Dushanbe, then went to study at the yeshiva of the Arkhipov Street synagogue in Moscow, where he was ordained as a shohet (ritual slaughterer) and mohel. Every year he toured the Bukharan Jewish communities of Central Asia — Karshi, Shahrisabz, Termez, Dushanbe — slaughtering cattle and poultry and circumcising children. He took no money; donations, he asked, should go to the synagogue treasury for those in need. In 1970 he brought the first mechanical matzah machine from Moscow to Dushanbe. Witnesses recall that even when the press crushed his hand, he did not utter a single moan. He was a member of the twenty-man council of the Dushanbe community and, well into old age, never refused the mitzvah of carrying the coffin to the distant cemetery hill. When the Iron Curtain lifted, Hananya spent years seeking an exit, and in 1977 he arrived in Israel with his family. His centuries-old prayer — «Next year in Jerusalem» — was fulfilled. In 1980 he died in a car accident near Netanya. His remains rest at Har HaMenuchot in Jerusalem.
«Hananya was a straight man, uncompromising where truth was at stake. Charity held a special place in his life. He never boasted of his height, his strength or his eloquence — always insisting that everything God gives us must serve to sanctify His name. Hananya was thoughtful and inquisitive; he knew how to listen carefully — which is a great art — and he was always a welcome guest in my home.» These were the words of the late scientist, orientalist and journalist Itzhak Mavashev. «She-yiheh zikhro baruch» — may his memory be blessed.תהי נשמתו צרורה בצרור החיים
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Isak Abdurakhmanov
ז״ל
1924 — 1943 | ה׳תש״ג
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.
⟦IMG:/img/isak-abdurahmanov-plaque.jpg|Memorial stone at the Ashdod cemetery⟧
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.
⟦IMG:/img/isak-monument-ashdod.jpg|Memorial to the fallen of the Great Patriotic War at the Ashdod cemetery⟧
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.תהי נשמתו צרורה בצרור החיים