While the term Bukhari is generally used to describe members of Central Asia’s long-established Jewish communities and their descendants, many come from other places than the historical Silk Road metropolis of Bukhara in modern-day Uzbekistan. One important center of Bukhari Jewry was once Khujand in Tajikistan, which at its height had a Jewish population of several thousand. On January 15, Khujand’s last Jewish resident, Jura Abaev, died at the age of eighty-three. Farangis Najibullah and Farzon Muhammadi write:

A retired factory worker, Abaev was also the last rabbi of Khujand’s only synagogue until it was closed in 2015 after having been empty since the 1990s. There were an estimated 15,000 Jews in Tajikistan in the late 1980s, but most of them left the Central Asian country after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Among those who left were Abaev’s five adult children and their families, his half-sister, and many friends and relatives.

Born into the Khujand family of a factory-worker father and a mother who was a theater actress, Abaev experienced many hardships as a child, including his parents’ divorce, deep poverty, and hunger during World War II.

Since 1967, Abaev had been the rabbi of Khujand’s synagogue, just a stone’s throw away from his house. His duties included conducting funerals, safekeeping the synagogue’s only copy of the Torah, and taking care of the house of worship. During the Soviet era, the religious practices of all faiths were under strict government control, while the organized practice of faith was almost nonexistent.

The first Jews are said to have settled in Khujand in the Middle Ages after coming to the city as merchants and tradesmen. The community, which shares a language and culture with the Tajiks, began to increase significantly in the 19th century when dozens of Jewish families moved to Khujand from the nearby city of Bukhara. . . . At its height in the 1940s, Tajikistan’s Jewish community was estimated to be around 30,000, with the majority of them living in Dushanbe and Khujand.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.