Walk south down 108th Street in Forest Hills on a Friday afternoon and the air carries cumin and grilled lamb, the shop signs read in Cyrillic and Hebrew, and the men hurrying home before sundown greet one another in a Persian dialect older than most of the buildings around them. This is the heart of the Jews in Forest Hills, New York, and more precisely of the Bukharian Jews, an ancient Central Asian community that rebuilt itself here after the Soviet Union let it go.
The Place
Forest Hills sits in the centre of Queens, a leafy, well-to-do neighbourhood built on what was farmland a little over a century ago. Its most famous quarter, Forest Hills Gardens, was laid out as a planned garden suburb with Tudor-style houses, winding lanes and a railway plaza, and it remains one of the most expensive places to live in the borough.
For decades the name Forest Hills meant tennis: the West Side Tennis Club moved here in 1915 and its stadium, opened in 1923, hosted the US Open for more than sixty years. Today the neighbourhood is better known for a different kind of arrival. Along its eastern edge, around 108th Street, a community that traces its roots to the oasis cities of Central Asia has made Forest Hills the capital of Bukharian Jewish life in America.
How It Became Bukharian
The Bukharian Jews take their name from the Emirate of Bukhara, in what is now Uzbekistan. For more than two thousand years they lived across Central Asia, in Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent and the towns of Tajikistan, speaking Bukhori, a Tajik-Persian dialect threaded with Hebrew. They were merchants, dyers, musicians and silk traders along the old routes that linked Persia to China.
The Soviet Century
Soviet rule closed the synagogues, suppressed religious teaching and cut the community off from the wider Jewish world for most of the twentieth century. Faith survived quietly, in homes and at family tables, but the public life of the community withered. When the Soviet Union began to crack at the end of the 1980s, the door to emigration finally opened.
The Great Migration
From 1989 onward, Bukharian Jews left Central Asia in enormous numbers, fearing instability and seeking the freedom to live openly as Jews. As many as 40,000 came to New York from across the region, the overwhelming majority from Uzbekistan. They did not scatter. They concentrated, and the place they concentrated was Queens.
The first arrivals settled in Forest Hills, drawn by an established Jewish presence, the relative affordability of the eastern blocks and the simple gravity of family. Where one cousin found an apartment, the next followed, and where one family opened a bakery or a meat market, others built around it. Within a generation, the community here grew into what is often described as the largest Bukharian community in the world, some 8,000 families clustered within walking distance of one another.
Building Bukharian Broadway
The shopping and business spine of the community settled on 108th Street, roughly between 63rd and 65th Avenues, a stretch locals nicknamed Bukharian Broadway. Within a few years it was lined with Bukharian-owned meat markets, bakeries, grocers, jewellers and restaurants, where Russian served as the common tongue of the street.
The original settlement soon spilled across the boundary into neighbouring Rego Park, and as families grew and prospered the community pushed further out into Kew Gardens Hills, Fresh Meadows and Jamaica Estates. By most estimates, more than 60,000 Bukharians now live across Forest Hills and Rego Park, part of an estimated 50,000-plus Bukharian Jews in New York City, almost all of them in Queens.
Institutions and Anchors
As the population grew, so did its institutions. Dozens of synagogues, yeshivas and community centres opened across Forest Hills and the surrounding neighbourhoods, many of them small congregations meeting in converted shopfronts and basements, others purpose-built and substantial.
Much of that building was driven by the philanthropy of Lev Leviev, the Bukharian-born diamond magnate and Chabad supporter who served as president of the Congress of Bukharian Jews. His backing helped complete the community’s flagship centre, and his foundations seeded religious schools far beyond Queens. The result, within a single generation, was a community with the infrastructure to sustain itself: schools for its children, halls for its weddings, and shuls within walking distance of nearly every door.
The Landmarks
Beth Gavriel Bukharian Jewish Center, 66-35 108th Street. One of the community’s principal synagogues and gathering places, sitting squarely on Bukharian Broadway. It functions as both a house of prayer and a community centre, hosting study programmes, holiday services and the life-cycle events that hold the neighbourhood together.
Bukharian Jewish Community Center, 106-16 70th Avenue. The flagship institution of the community and home to the offices of the Congress of Bukharian Jews, the umbrella body that links Bukharian congregations across North America. Completed in the mid-2000s with the help of philanthropist Lev Leviev, it anchors the community’s religious, educational and social life.
Salute, 63-61 108th Street. A long-running kosher Bukharian restaurant on the main strip, serving the Central Asian dishes that define the cuisine: plov, kebabs, fried fish and samsa baked in a tandoor. Reviewed in the local press as early as the turn of the century, it is one of the institutions that made 108th Street a destination for Bukharian food.
Gavriel Davidov Corner, 64th Road at 108th Street. The City of New York co-named this corner in honour of a community leader who helped establish many of the yeshivas, synagogues and centres that fill the neighbourhood. The sign sits near the epicentre of Bukharian life, a small civic acknowledgement of how completely the community has woven itself into the fabric of Queens.
Queens Jewish Center, 66-05 108th Street. An older, established synagogue on the same street, predating the Bukharian wave, it reflects the wider Jewish presence that drew the first Bukharian families to Forest Hills and that the newcomers joined and reshaped.
108th Street, between 63rd and 65th Avenues. Not a single building but the commercial heart of the community, the stretch known as Bukharian Broadway. Meat markets, bakeries, jewellery shops and grocers crowd the pavements, and on a Friday the whole street moves at the quickening pace of people preparing for Shabbat.
Where They Came From
The Bukharian Jews of Forest Hills come, overwhelmingly, from Uzbekistan, with smaller numbers from Tajikistan and the wider Central Asian republics. Their home cities were the famous oasis towns of the Silk Road: Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent and Dushanbe, places where Jewish neighbourhoods had stood for centuries.
What pulled them out was the unravelling of the Soviet Union and the uncertainty that followed independence in Central Asia. What pulled them to Forest Hills specifically was chain migration in its purest form: each family followed relatives already settled, until the bulk of an entire diaspora had relocated to the same few square miles of Queens.
The migration was so complete that the original homelands now hold only a remnant. Where Central Asia once counted its Bukharian Jews in the tens of thousands, only a few hundred remain. The community’s living centre of gravity is no longer Bukhara or Samarkand. It is Forest Hills.
Forest Hills Today
Today the Bukharian presence is woven into the everyday texture of Forest Hills. The food culture is the most visible thread: kosher tandoor bakeries, restaurants serving plov and oshi-sabo, and grocers stocking the herbs, dried fruits and cuts of meat that Central Asian cooking requires. Bukharian cooking leans on cumin, coriander, turmeric and a light touch of chilli, with rice and pasta common and meat used to enrich a dish rather than dominate it. The signature is plov, also called osh or palov, a rice dish cooked with meat, carrots and onions in a cauldron, often joined on the Sabbath table by oshi-sabo, simmered slowly overnight. For many Bukharians, the neighbourhood is the one place outside Central Asia where these ingredients are simply assumed.
Prosperity has changed the streetscape too. Some Bukharian families have built large, ornate houses on lots that once held modest homes, a shift that has occasionally drawn friction with longer-settled neighbours over taste and scale. It is the familiar story of an immigrant community that arrived with little and, within a generation, arrived.
What holds it together is density and continuity. Children attend Bukharian yeshivas, marry within the community, and stay close to parents and grandparents. The synagogue remains the centre of communal life, and the cuisine, the music and the Bukhori language persist in a way that many older diasporas envy. For a people who spent a Soviet century forbidden to gather, the ordinary sight of crowded Forest Hills shuls on a Saturday morning is its own quiet triumph.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Bukharian Jews in Forest Hills?
The Jews in Forest Hills, New York, are largely Bukharian Jews who arrived from Soviet Central Asia, mostly Uzbekistan, from 1989 onward as the Soviet Union collapsed. The first arrivals settled in Forest Hills, and through chain migration relatives followed relatives until the neighbourhood became the largest Bukharian community in the world.
What is Bukharian Broadway?
Bukharian Broadway is the nickname for the stretch of 108th Street between roughly 63rd and 65th Avenues in Forest Hills. It is the commercial heart of the community, lined with Bukharian-owned meat markets, bakeries, grocers, jewellers and restaurants where Russian is the common language of the street.
How many Bukharian Jews live in Queens?
Estimates put the Bukharian Jewish population of New York City at more than 50,000, with practically all of them living in Queens. More than 60,000 Bukharians are thought to live across Forest Hills and neighbouring Rego Park alone, making this the densest Bukharian settlement anywhere in the world.
What language do Bukharian Jews speak?
Their traditional language is Bukhori, a Tajik-Persian dialect that incorporates Hebrew words. In the United States many Bukharians also use Russian as a common tongue, especially in the shops and restaurants of Forest Hills, alongside Hebrew for prayer and English in daily American life.
Where can you eat Bukharian food in Forest Hills?
108th Street and the surrounding blocks are dotted with kosher Bukharian restaurants and bakeries. Salute, at 63-61 108th Street, is one of the long-established names, serving plov, kebabs and tandoor-baked breads that define Central Asian Jewish cuisine.
Are the Jews in Forest Hills connected to other New York Jewish communities?
Yes. The Jews in Forest Hills, New York, are part of a much wider Jewish geography across the region, from the Orthodox enclaves of Lakewood, New Jersey and Passaic to the Hasidic village of Kiryas Joel and the Squirrel Hill community in Pittsburgh. The Bukharian community has its own distinct Central Asian heritage, but it shares the institutions and rhythms of Jewish New York.
If your family’s story passed through Forest Hills, or any of the places Bukharian and other Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the oasis cities of Samarkand and Bukhara to the meat markets and shuls of 108th Street, to wherever you are now.