- Population
- ~100,000-160,000
- Location
- Jerusalem (Bukharan Quarter), Tel Aviv, Or Yehuda, Holon, Lod and other central cities
Bukharan Jews are the Persian-speaking Jews of Central Asia, from the cities of Bukhara, Samarkand, Tashkent and Dushanbe. Pious families began coming to Jerusalem in the 1870s and built its Bukharan Quarter of grand stone houses in the 1890s, but most of the community arrived from the Soviet Union in the 1970s and after 1991, and today some 100,000-160,000 live in Israel, especially in Or Yehuda, Holon, Lod, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The older generation still speaks Bukhori, a Jewish form of Tajik Persian, alongside Russian, while the young speak Hebrew. Weddings and family gatherings feature osh plov, the Central Asian rice pilaf, and the classical shashmaqam music in which Bukharan Jewish musicians excelled.