History of the Jews in Tajikistan 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 migrated to Tajikistan. In the Soviet Union, including Tajikistan, beginning in the 1970s, Jews who were able, began to emigrate to Israel, as well as to the United States. By the late 1980s, many of Tajikistan's Jews had left. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Tajikistan gained independence and the country fell into a state of civil war between the government and Islamist forces. Continuous military conflict
Geography of Tajikistan Uzbekistan, generates large amounts of toxic waste gases that have been blamed for a sharp increase in the number of birth defects among people who live within range of its emissions. In 1992 the Supreme Soviet of Tajikistan established a Ministry of Environmental Protection. However, the enforcement activity of the ministry was limited severely by the political upheavals that plagued Tajikistan in its first years of independence. The only registered private environmental group in Tajikistan in the early 1990s was a chapter of the Social-Ecological Alliance, the largest informal environmental association in the former Soviet Union. The Tajik branch's main