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Family Is All That Matters 32 For example, store owners were oen accused of using unfair balances or scales. Much of this prejudice against storeowners was barely disguised anti-Semitism. In Soviet times, Jews were sometimes prevented om working in other professions, so they oen became shopkeepers. Although her daughters knew that Hava herself was honest, they were still ashamed that she was a salesperson. Iosif went to high school for eighth, ninth, and tenth grades. He graduated on June 17, and the graduation party was scheduled for the following Sunday: June 21, 1941. It was on that exact day that the Nazis invaded Russia and Russia entered World War II. The tradition for kids aer high school graduation was to go to the Red Square in the Kremlin to celebrate; for Iosif and his classmates, there was no celebration. There were 15 boys in Iosif 's graduating class who were 18 years old on that day. Each of those boys was immediately draed into the army. But Iosif was just 17 years old. His father, in the tradition of many Jewish parents, had enrolled his son in first grade at age seven, instead of the traditional age of eight. This act saved Iosif 's life because he was too young to be draed. All 15 of his classmates who had been draed into the army were killed in action. So instead of entering the military, he joined his family during their evacuation journey om Moscow to Tashkent. It was during this trip that Iosif became separated om his family, then reunited, wounded and near death om the cold, and that the family survived in part due to a letter that Iosif 's sister Rosa had provided confirming her status as a military officer. We have now have arrived at the middle of our story. In February of 1942, the family arrived in Tashkent, meeting Shlomo's sister, Sara Volsun, and her husband David Garber. The entire square was filled with evacuees om Moscow. There was not enough Bukharan Jews Bukharan (Bukharian) Jews is a blanket term for Jews om Central Asia who speak Bukhori, a dialect of the Persian language. Their name comes om the Uzbek city of Bukhara, which once had a large Jewish community. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the vast majority have returned to Israel or moved to the United States. The Bukharan Jews trace their ancestry to Israelites who never came back om the Babylonian captivity aer exile in the 7th century BC. In Central Asia, they survived for centuries through many conquering influences. The community was essentially cut off om the rest of the Jewish world for more than 2,000 years and managed to survive in the face of countless odds. They are considered one of the oldest ethno-religious groups of Central Asia and over the years have developed their own culture. With the establishment of Soviet rule in 1917, life for the Jewish people seriously deteriorated. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, thousands of Jews om Soviet- controlled areas fled religious oppression, confiscation of property, arrests, and repressions, and escaped to the relatively safe yet still oppressed Bukharan region in Uzbekistan. World War II then brought over a million more Jewish refugees om both the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to this historically Jewish area.

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