Soviet Central Asia to the city from around the Soviet Union. The population also increased with thousands of ethnic Tajiks migrating to Tajikistan following the transfer of Bukhara and Samarkand to the Uzbek SSR. Dushanbe later became the home to a university and the Tajik Academy of Sciences. Dushanbe also had a relatively high military population during the war with Afghanistan. The Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic which is also known as Turkmenia (or sometimes known as Turkmenistan) was one of fifteen constituent republics of the Soviet Union. It was initially established on August 7, 1921 as Turkmen Oblast of the Turkestan ASSR. On
Dushanbe Synagogue two thousand years, the building was of considerable historical significance. The ownership of the building was also disputed. The Jewish community reported that it had documentation of its original (pre-Soviet) ownership of the building and the purchase of the land on which the synagogue had been constructed. The Dushanbe municipal authorities argued, on the other hand, that the state owned the land and the building since it underwent nationalisation in 1952 by the Soviet authorities. Back in 2004, the Chief Rabbi of Central Asia, Rabbi Abraham Dovid Gurevich, raised the issue of antisemitism, hinting that the prospect of a synagogue