Danger and daring

Initially, Bukharian Jews flourished under Russian rule. They prospered economically, and some became highly educated. After the Russian Revolution, however, the spread of Communism spelled disaster for this traditional community. Geula’s grandfather, a Kohein and the descendant of six previous generations of rabbis, became the chief rabbi of the community when his older brother, then chief rabbi, was shot by the Bolsheviks.

“My grandfather, Rav Hezkiah, was only 24 years old. He had a lot of knowledge, but little experience,” she says. “He worked hard to catch up. He became the regional expert in the laws of agunot, chalitzah, and gittin.”

Geula picks up a sefer from the coffee table. Entitled Zarach Kochav MiYaakov and published in Jerusalem in 1988 by an uncle, it contains responsa from Rav Hezkiah and stories about how he brought people back to Torah. The cover displays a rav with a graying beard and almond-shaped eyes, wearing a caftan and an astrakhan toque.

But the Bolsheviks outlawed all Jewish practices: shechitah, Shabbos, bris milah. Rav Hezkiah refused to heed warnings, continuing to pray and teach Torah. The authorities caught up with him, threw him in jail, and brought him before a judge.

“He knew they would sentence him to death,” Geula relates. “When the judge took a recess after the trial, the Rav asked to use the bathroom. They led him there, and waited outside 15 minutes, then 20. Finally they banged down the door — and my grandfather had disappeared! He had used his knowledge of Kabbalah to make himself invisible, roeh v’lo nirah.”

Hezkiah fled, sheltered by a Muslim farmer friend, as the humiliated police force searched all night. Hezkiah’s pregnant wife was thrown in jail, the children sent to foster care. When his wife gave birth to twin boys, his son-in-law managed to smuggle them in baskets to their father for circumcision one by one.

Rav Hezkiah had waited to make sure his wife gave birth safely, but felt he couldn’t continue putting his life and the lives of his Muslim protectors in danger. He fled the country, disguised as a woman with a chador, expecting to send for his wife later. He brought two sons with him, to avert their conscription into the army. Hired rohdahns took them through the arduous roads into Afghanistan. There, local Jewish women flocked to Rav Hezkiah to solve their issues of agunot, chalitzah, and shalom bayit.

In the meantime, back in Bukhara, the twin baby boys passed away from typhus. Geula’s grandmother became deeply depressed. One of her daughters was able to bribe an official to let her out of jail.

Rav Hezekiah continued on to Mashhad, an Iranian city where Jews were forced to practice in secret like Anusim, celebrating Shabbat and Yom Tov surreptitiously. “He kept sending money to my grandmother so that she could join him,” Geula recounts. “But she never read the letters, assuming they were meant for the community. She’d just bring them to the rav. He’d open them, tell her that her husband said he was well and sends his love. Then he’d pocket the money to get his own family out of the country.” She sighs. “I don’t judge. How many people in desperate situations would have made the same choice?”

Eventually Rav Hezkiah realized what was going on, and arranged for his wife and two daughters to join him. They were brought over the border in the late 1930s, swathed in chadors, their faces and bodies blackened with charcoal to make them unattractive to would-be marauders. Geula’s mother, Malka, about five, was carried on the back of a man who took pleasure in pinching her, and sometimes she’d refuse to climb on him while afraid to say why.

“She carried such difficult memories of that experience that she was super protective of my sisters and me when we were growing up,” Geula recalls.

They arrived in Mashhad during Ramadan, during a parade of Shia Muslims beating themselves bloody with metal chains, accompanied by wailing spectators. “My mother found it so bizarre she started to giggle.” Geula says. “Her mother jabbed her with an elbow to keep her quiet.” They were whisked to an aunt’s house, where they had a joyful reunion that Shabbat evening, eating pilaf in her basement.

The family moved to Tehran for two years, then on to Jerusalem. Rav Hezkiah’s reputation preceded him, Geula recounts with pride. “When he reached the gates of the city, Rav Kook and seven other rabbis came out to welcome him, carrying seven sifrei Torah. My grandfather brought a sefer Torah of his own from Bukhara.” The family settled in Shechunat HaBucharim.

Tough Times in the Holy Land

Geula’s mother, Malka, married young, in 1941, to a man from a wealthy family with a promising future: He had started pharmacy studies at the University of Beirut. Shmuel Saidoff’s family owned a factory in Motza, but when Arab vandals burned it down, the family lost their money and he couldn’t continue.

The couple began their married life in Jerusalem, but then Shmuel had a dream in which his father told him to leave Jerusalem because there wouldn’t be food there. “My mother told him to go ahead, and we’d join him,” Geula relates. “He left for Yaffo, where the Arabs had already fled, shortly before the War of Independence in 1948. She left later, during a Red Cross cease-fire during the war. There were three buses that day, all of them with covered tires for protection. My mother sang us Shema Yisrael over and over to get us to sleep. At the time it was a long trip, close to three hours. Of the three buses that left Jerusalem, only ours arrived safely; I heard the others were blown up.”

Their father had started selling vegetables in Shuk HaCarmel, living in an abandoned store. But life was very hard; there was no milk for their baby, who developed an ulcer from feeding problems and had to go to the hospital for treatment. One night, while her husband was on army duty and Malka went to see the baby in the hospital, asking neighbors to keep an eye on the children, a fire broke out — someone had set fire to some egg cartons piled behind the house.

“The neighbors rushed to save us,” Geula remembers. “They broke the storefront. I remember husky men picking up our metal beds, with us in them, and carrying them out. My sister didn’t stop screaming. Later in life she was emotionally fragile, and I always wondered if that night contributed to her condition.”

Now homeless, Malka cried to her husband’s army superior, saying she couldn’t raise a family in a broken store with mice and bugs. He told the couple, “Choose any house you want!” Shmuel chose a home. Geula remembers the high ceilings, the yard with chickens and vegetables, the outhouse.

But Malka envisioned a better future in the US, where her sister lived. At her urging, Shmuel went to New York in 1957, leaving Malka behind.

Through a rabbi who was a Holocaust survivor, Shmuel found a sponsor for Malka’s visa in Long Beach, a furrier named Leon Wohl who agreed to employ her as a seamstress. “We left on a Zim line. It took us two weeks to reach the US,” Geula says. “My mother was with another Jewish woman, and they had six kids between them. We joined my father in Long Beach, where he’d found work in a supermarket.”

Life in American wasn’t easy. They had to learn a new language; the parents worked long hours. “My mother didn’t like being in the house. She’d work 16-hour days,” Geula says. “My father would pick up the slack at home. Today, I think my mother had a hard time accepting her life. She’d lost a baby boy, her only son, before I was born, at Pesach time. Pesach was always a very sad time in our home. She married into a family that had been wealthy, yet ended up having to work hard to make ends meet.”

The girls were enrolled in the Hebrew Institute of Far Rockaway. Geula, surrounded by immigrants from all over the world, was unsure how to navigate her new environment. “I learned to be quiet, to listen. I was a fragile child, a bit withdrawn; since I stuttered, I preferred to observe rather than interact.”

She had a hard time in school, although at home she was managing the household and watching her siblings. Hence, when Geula, 16, met her husband Rolen at a Purim celebration in shul, he seemed like Prince Charming. “It gave me self-confidence; my stuttering diminished greatly,” she says. “He was much older than me, a university student, and seemed to know so much about the world.”

Rolen came from a Persian family; Geula’s mother was originally suspicious that perhaps he was a Bahai, not a Jew. But her aunt, who knew “everybody,” verified that he was not only Jewish, but a Kohein. Some years later, while chatting casually with Rolen’s paternal grandmother, Geula realized that Rolen’s family had spent time in Bukhara for business reasons, and her own grandfather had actually written the ketubah for Rolen’s grandparents and presided over Rolen’s father’s bar mitzvah.

When the Shah of Iran offered a trip home for Iranian students in the US in 1961, the new couple took advantage of the opportunity, allowing Geula to meet Rolen’s family. Their flight had stopovers in Italy and Syria, and they sat for hours in the Syrian airport until they learned the reason for the delay: Geula, with her Israeli passport, was considered a security risk. The group leader finally managed to convince the authorities that a 16-year-old girl posed no threat.

In 1960s Iran, plane travel wasn’t commonplace, and in the absence of flight updates, people would simply come to the airport and wait. Geula and her husband descended the airplane steps to the tarmac to find thousands of people waiting, including almost ten carloads of her husband’s family. “They brought so many flowers I could barely walk!” Geula says. “We drove to their house, where all the neighbors came out and a rabbi in a white robe was sharpening his knife outside. He shechted a sheep right there as a kapparah, and I had to pass over the blood while everyone sang Az Yashir and the women ululated.” The lamb was later butchered into pieces (from her room’s balcony, Geula watched the rabbi blowing up the lungs) and roasted for a seven-day feast.

Geula was taken around, modestly covered, to bazaars and teahouses; the family brought her to many weddings, which always took place on Thursday nights, because Friday was the day off in Iran. They visited the graves of Mordechai and Esther in Hamadan, and the cave where the spirit of Serach bat Asher is said to dwell; they saw the poverty-stricken Jewish quarter of Esfahan. As Geula spent time in the kitchen assisting Rolen’s grandmother, she slowly picked up Farsi. They stayed for about six weeks, but would return for other visits.

A New Life

When Geula returned from Iran, she was expecting a child — and so was her mother, a still-beautiful woman who’d been only 36 when her daughter married.

“Traditional Bukharians attach great importance to having a boy, and my mother had only girls,” Geula says. “I couldn’t help but worry what would happen if my mother had a girl and I had a boy; she would feel horrible.”

Ultimately, however, Malka finally got her boy, and Geula had a girl. Her father, who had four brothers, was overjoyed by a granddaughter.

Geula and her husband would have two girls and two boys. With the same “golden hands” as her mother, Geula sewed much of their clothing and prepared beautiful Bukharian and Persian meals, always opening her home to guests. As the children entered school, she decided it was time to educate herself, taking out books and magazines at the library.

She couldn’t enroll in formal courses, as life was simply too busy. Her house became a sort of way station for her husband’s arriving relatives. Her in-laws lived with her for a year and a half while her mother-in-law received medical treatment, and the Sabets took in various siblings, nieces, and nephews.

Jewish Iranians began pouring into New York in the 1970s, around the time of the Revolution, and Geula volunteered as a translator, helping new arrivals find housing, furniture, and jobs. For three years, she served as guardian of a child with cerebral palsy whose parents had brought her to a hospital in the US and returned to Iran.

After the wave of Iranians came a wave of Russians, including many Bukharians. Again Geula stepped up to the plate, working with NYANA to settle them in. “I even met some relatives,” she says. After several generations of Communism, these people needed spiritual as well as material help.

One 18-year-old married Bukharian woman was overwhelmed by her pregnancy, unsure that she and her husband would be able to provide for the baby. Geula promised she’d take care of getting everything the baby needed and made the bris when he was born. “I even provided my husband as the Kohein for the pidyon haben,” she says.

In several instances, she convinced young men to have a bris milah, telling them better to take care of it before they married. She taught English to the immigrants, with liberal side doses of information about kashrut and Jewish holidays. She also taught Hebrew and ESL, and served as a liaison to Yeshiva of Central Queens and Yeshiva High School of Queens.

In the midst of this, Geula went back to school. It took 14 years, but she ultimately earned a bachelor’s degree from Queens College and did master’s work in Sephardic studies at NYU. Today, the former stutterer has turned into a public speaker, educating women’s groups about Bukharian culture using a curriculum she designed. She works with the Board of Jewish Education, using cultural education as a platform for educating unaffiliated Jews about their heritage.

She became a great-grandmother six years ago, but shows no sign of slowing down. She spends time with her nine great-grandchildren, attends shiurim (including one given by her grandson, Rabbi Aviad Bodner, on the Lower East Side), travels, and lectures.

Her family journey has been long — from Bukhara to Iran to Israel to the US, and sometimes back again. Geula is now in the process of organizing a memoir, weaving her tales into a colorful tapestry.

Actually, perhaps such a memoir would better be described as an Oriental rug. Think of it as a magical flying carpet, one that lifts the imagination and causes it to soar.

Bukharian Jewry in a Nutshell

Fascinating facts culled from Geula’s curriculum:

There are approximately 250,000 Jews of Bukharian descent in Eretz Yisrael today, and 50,000 in New York.

The Bukharian language is a combination of Farsi, Tajik, Aramaic, and Hebrew. The Bukharians had their own literature, poetry, and Torah works, usually written in Rashi script. Like the Jews in ancient Mitzrayim, they retained their distinctive Jewish dress and Hebrew names.

The Bukharians lived for over ten centuries under Muslim emirs. They had to pay special taxes as dhimmis, and were prohibited from carrying arms or testifying in court. Their homes could not be higher than Muslim homes, and their occupations were limited.

The Bukharians eat only glatt kosher meat, and use hand shemurah matzah during Pesach. They have their own special bread, like a large pita, and make excellent rice pilafs and kebabs. Their region was known for apricots and exotic fruits — “We had 56 varieties of cantaloupe,” Geula says — as well as oriental spices.

Families were large and lived grouped around a central courtyard, which would include a well, a spice garden, an area for cooking, and a separate area for outhouses.

During World War II, many Jewish refugees fled to Soviet Uzbekistan, because the Communists were less active in policing religious activity in Muslim regions.

The Bukharians place great importance on hachnassat orchim and hiddur mitzvah. For smachot, they would don beautiful silk caftans. Both men and women played drums to accompany the dancing.