History of the Jews in Central Asia and varied history. Jews first arrived in the eastern part of the Emirate of Bukhara, in what is today Tajikistan, in the 2nd century BC. After the Communists came to power they organized the country into republics, including Tajikistan, which was first formed as an autonomous republic within Uzbekistan in 1924, and in 1929 became a full-fledged republic. In an effort to develop Tajikistan, Soviet authorities encouraged migration, including thousands of Jews, from neighboring Uzbekistan. Most Jews settled in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, where they opened the Dushanbe synagogue. During World War II, a second wave of Ashkenazic Jews
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