Walk south on 108th Street on a Friday afternoon and the air smells of charcoal and cumin. Skewers of lamb turn over open flame in restaurant windows. Bakers pull disc-shaped loaves of non from clay tandoor ovens, the dough blistered and stamped in the center. Shop signs run in three alphabets at once, Latin and Hebrew and Cyrillic, and the language you actually hear on the sidewalk is none of those. It is Bukhori, a 2,000-year-old dialect of Persian carried here from the oasis cities of Central Asia.
This is the heart of the largest community of Bukharian Jews anywhere outside Israel. Tens of thousands of them live in these few square miles of central Queens, in Rego Park and neighboring Forest Hills, a place locals only half-jokingly call Queensistan. They are among the oldest Jewish communities on earth, and most of them got here in a single rush of about thirty years.
Rego Park: The Place
Rego Park sits in central Queens, bounded roughly by Forest Hills to the east, Elmhurst to the west, and the Long Island Expressway slicing across the north. Queens Boulevard, ten lanes wide, is its spine, and the M and R trains stop at 63rd Drive and 67th Avenue. The housing is a mix of prewar apartment buildings, attached brick row houses, and the larger detached homes that climb toward the Forest Hills border. The 63rd Drive and 108th Street corridors hold most of the storefronts.
How Rego Park Became Little Bukhara
Before the Bukharians
For most of its history this was farmland. The Dutch and English settlers called the area Whitepot, a name folklore traces to a land deal struck with Native inhabitants for three white clay pots. Through the colonial centuries the Remsen and Werner families farmed the fields where Queens Boulevard now runs.
The neighborhood that exists today was essentially invented in 1925. A developer called the Real Good Construction Company bought the farmland and began throwing up houses, 525 eight-room homes that sold for about $8,000 each. The company shortened its own name to brand the place: REal GOod became Rego Park. Stores went up along Queens Boulevard and 63rd Drive in 1926, apartment buildings followed, and by the 1930s Rego Park was a settled middle-class corner of Queens, heavily Jewish but firmly Ashkenazi and American.
The Bukharians Arrive
The first Bukharian families trickled in during the early 1970s, when the Soviet Union briefly cracked open its doors and a small number of Central Asian Jews slipped out among the larger wave of Soviet Jewish refugees. They were Persian-speaking Jews from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, distinct in language, food, and custom from both the Russian-speaking Ashkenazim around them and the American Jews already living in Queens. The resettlement agency NYANA, which placed a quarter of a million Soviet Jewish refugees over the years, steered many of the newcomers toward Forest Hills and Rego Park.
Then the trickle became a flood. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, something close to a quarter of a million Bukharian Jews left Central Asia almost all at once. Most went to Israel. The largest American share, perhaps 50,000 people, funneled into these two adjacent Queens neighborhoods, drawn by the oldest engine of immigration there is: a relative who had already made it, a cousin with a spare room, a name and an address on a slip of paper.
Chain migration here was unusually tight because Bukharian families are large and clannish by tradition, built around multiple generations under one roof. One settler tended to pull a dozen others. Aron Aronov, who arrived in 1989 and is said to have helped countless families find their footing, became a kind of one-man welcome committee. The community did not spread out across the city. It concentrated, deliberately, within walking distance of itself.
Rego Park at Its Peak
By the 2000s the transformation was total. A community that had counted a single synagogue in Queens at the start grew to more than forty within roughly three decades. Kosher butchers, Central Asian groceries, and bakeries with walk-in tandoor ovens lined 108th Street, the strip that picked up the nickname Bukharian Broadway. Russian became the lingua franca of commerce, Bukhori the language of home, and English the project of the children.
Life organized itself around the catering hall and the synagogue. Weddings and bar mitzvahs routinely ran to 300 or 500 guests. The community poured its growing wealth into institutions, most visibly the five-story Bukharian Jewish Community Center that opened in Forest Hills in 2005. The neighborhood had become, in everything but climate, a piece of Samarkand transplanted to Queens.
The Change
Success brought friction. In the Cord Meyer section of Forest Hills, prosperous Bukharian families began tearing down modest Tudor and Cape Cod houses and replacing them with very large homes built to hold extended families and host enormous memorials and holiday dinners. Longtime neighbors complained about the scale; the new arrivals answered that a big house, in Bukharian tradition, is a duty, the place where the whole family gathers. The dispute went to City Hall, and in 2009 the City Council rezoned Cord Meyer to cap the size of new construction.
The deeper change was generational. The grandparents who arrived speaking Bukhori watched their American-born grandchildren grow up speaking English, marrying outside the community, and drifting toward the broader currents of Jewish life. The institutions that went up in these years were built partly as a wall against exactly that tide. Like the Russian-speaking enclave that took root in Brighton Beach in the same Soviet exodus, Bukharian Queens had to work out how much of the old world to keep once the new one stopped being foreign.
The Landmarks of Little Bukhara
Bukharian Jewish Community Center, 106-16 70th Avenue. The five-story center, completed in 2005 with major support from the diamond magnate and Bukharian philanthropist Lev Leviev, is the community’s flagship. Its facade carries a mosaic of Jerusalem and the words Bukharian Jewish Community Center beside Bukharian Jewish Congress, the umbrella body for the community across the United States and Canada, whose offices sit on the top floor. A synagogue, classrooms, and a constant churn of youth programming fill the rest.
Beth Gavriel Bukharian Jewish Center, 66-35 108th Street. Carved out of an existing building, Beth Gavriel grew into the largest Bukharian congregation in New York, claiming more than a thousand member families. It became a launchpad for Chazaq, the Orthodox outreach group founded in 2006, which packed more than 500 people into one of its early events here. On a normal day it runs a mikvah, a food pantry, and classes from morning to night.
Cheburechnaya, 92-09 63rd Drive. The restaurant began around the turn of the millennium when Nadya Masturov and her son fried lamb-stuffed chebureki in a nearby apartment, then opened a storefront named for the dish. Her son Isak Sionov runs it now, and on a busy weekday the kitchen sends out close to a thousand skewers of kosher kebab. It is the kind of place that defines a neighborhood’s reputation for outsiders.
Rokhat Kosher Bakery, Rego Park. Brothers Roshiel and Rafael Samekhov left Uzbekistan in 1992 and brought the tandoor with them. Behind the counter sits a walk-in tanoor the size of an industrial refrigerator, and out of it come samsa folded around lamb and onion, and the disc-shaped lepeshka bread no Bukharian table is complete without. It is as much a gathering spot as a shop.
Bukharian Jewish Museum, 99-01 64th Road. Aron Aronov opened this museum in 1990, first in his own basement, and has made some twenty-five trips back to Uzbekistan to fill it, hauling home textiles, instruments, photographs, and ritual objects. It is the only ethnology museum in the world devoted to Bukharian Jews. After stints in other locations it now occupies space in a Rego Park residential building, still run on Aronov’s stubborn devotion.
Congregation Tifereth Israel, Corona. Just west of Rego Park stands a wooden synagogue built in 1911 in a Gothic and Moorish style, founded by Ashkenazi Jews who had moved out from the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side. As that congregation faded, Bukharian newcomers began praying in its basement in the 1990s and eventually took the building over, a literal handing-down of Jewish Queens from one immigrant generation to the next. The New York Landmarks Conservancy later led a major restoration.
Mount Carmel Cemetery, Glendale. Opened in 1906 and close to Forest Hills, Mount Carmel holds hundreds of Bukharian graves, instantly recognizable as slabs of polished black granite laser-etched with life-sized portraits of the dead. The custom, which Bukharians adopted in Central Asia in the Soviet era, makes the cemetery a kind of open-air gallery of faces, and tending those stones is among the community’s most serious obligations.
Where the Rego Park Bukharians Came From
They came from the old Silk Road cities of Central Asia, above all Bukhara and Samarkand in Uzbekistan, along with Tashkent and the Tajik capital of Dushanbe. Jews had lived in this region for some two millennia, tracing their presence to the Babylonian exile and later forced resettlements, and they developed a Judeo-Persian language, Bukhori, all their own. Cut off from the rest of the Jewish world for centuries, they were reconnected in the late 1700s by a Sephardic emissary, Rabbi Yosef Maman, who arrived in Bukhara and reshaped the community’s religious life.
Russian conquest of the region in the 1860s, then seven decades of Soviet rule, steadily eroded that world. The Soviets suppressed religious teaching and Russified daily life, and when the system finally fell in 1991, the community left almost in its entirety. Bukhara, which had been home to Jews for 2,000 years, is now said to count barely a hundred. The world they left behind effectively reassembled itself in Queens.
Rego Park Today
The community is no longer arriving. It is settling in, and arguing with itself, the way every immigrant community does once the crisis of moving is over. The first generation worries aloud about a second generation that prays in English, marries out, and cannot always read the Cyrillic on a grandparent’s headstone. The institutions keep consolidating to hold the center: synagogues merge and rebuild, the Community Center expands its programs, the Queens Gymnasia day school that Lev Leviev founded in 2002 keeps educating hundreds of children on free tuition.
On the street, the Bukharian character is still unmistakable. The kebab houses are full, the bakeries still fire their tandoors before dawn, and the catering halls still book the annual yushvo memorials where families gather to honor their dead. The footprint has spread east into Kew Gardens Hills and Fresh Meadows as prices climbed, but Rego Park and Forest Hills remain the core.
What makes the place remarkable is its stubbornness. As the community organizer Manashe Khaimov, born in Samarkand, likes to put it, the only thing Bukharians truly share with Russian Jews is the seventy years both spent under the Soviets; the other 2,000 years were entirely their own. That long memory is the whole point. A community that kept its language and its faith through twenty centuries of empires is not about to lose them on 108th Street, and the second generation, fluent in two worlds, is the proof that it carries forward.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Bukharian Jews settle in Rego Park and Forest Hills?
The first arrivals in the 1970s were steered toward these central Queens neighborhoods by resettlement agencies, and after the Soviet collapse in 1991 chain migration did the rest. Because Bukharian families are large and tightly knit, each settler drew relatives to the same blocks, concentrating the Bukharian Jews in Queens within a small, walkable core rather than scattering them across the city.
Is Rego Park still a Bukharian neighborhood today?
Yes. Rego Park and adjacent Forest Hills remain the center of the largest Bukharian community in the world outside Israel, with kosher Central Asian restaurants, bakeries, and more than forty synagogues. The community has expanded eastward into Kew Gardens Hills and Fresh Meadows, but the 108th Street and 63rd Drive corridors are still its commercial heart.
What are the most famous Bukharian landmarks in Queens?
The five-story Bukharian Jewish Community Center on 70th Avenue in Forest Hills is the flagship, alongside the large Beth Gavriel center on 108th Street. The Bukharian Jewish Museum in Rego Park, the only one of its kind in the world, and restaurants like Cheburechnaya on 63rd Drive round out the best-known institutions.
Where did the Bukharian Jews come from?
They come from the Silk Road cities of Central Asia, chiefly Bukhara and Samarkand in Uzbekistan, plus Tashkent and Dushanbe in Tajikistan. Jews lived there for roughly 2,000 years and spoke Bukhori, a Judeo-Persian dialect, before nearly the entire community emigrated after the Soviet Union fell.
When did Bukharian Jews first arrive in Queens?
The first families came in the early 1970s, when the Soviet Union loosened emigration. The decisive wave of Bukharian Jews in Queens followed the Soviet collapse in 1991, when roughly 50,000 settled in Rego Park and Forest Hills over the next decade.
If your family’s story passed through the oasis cities of Central Asia, or through the kebab houses and synagogues of central Queens, those streets are a chapter worth tracing. Compared to communities like the tightly bound Satmar Hasidim of Williamsburg, the Bukharians wrote one of New York’s most distinctive immigrant chapters in a single generation.