David Mavashev on the Chala Legacy and Jews by Paternal Descent: ‘Keep the Tradition, but Keep the People’

This report was translated from Russian by Bukharian Jewish Post from coverage by The Bukharian Times.

David Mavashev, president of the Itzhak Mavashev Foundation, says he is not proposing to change Jewish law, but he wants rabbis and the community to look within halacha for ways to welcome people of Jewish descent through their fathers. He made the argument in the fourth part of a long interview with Rafael Nektalov published in The Bukharian Times’ Oct. 22, 2026, edition.

The paper said it had received many responses to the series, which began in issues 1285 through 1287. The installment was held from issue 1288, which was devoted to the legacy of the poet and musician Ilyas Mallaev and the Mallaev Readings conference.

“I am not a rabbi”

“I do not propose changing the Torah, and I do not think I can set halachic rules. I am not a rabbi,” Mavashev told Nektalov. “But halacha as we know it today was not created in a single day either.” He pointed to the ban on taking a second wife associated with Rabbeinu Gershom about a thousand years ago as an example of a rabbinic enactment responding to new circumstances, while stressing that the two questions are “completely different” and that the example does not mean a rabbi can simply set aside matrilineal descent.

The chala

Mavashev said the conversation would be incomplete without the history of the chala, the Bukharian Jews who converted to Islam under pressure but secretly continued to practice Judaism. In the 18th century, Bukharian Jews were forced to accept Islam, he said, and communal memory preserves the story of Khudoydod, who refused and was executed, a story told in the “Khudoydod-nama.” Others converted to survive, and in many of their families the memory of Jewish origin endured.

“We have no right today to judge those who wanted to live,” he said. He noted that an unbroken maternal line that can be proven keeps a person’s halachic status regardless of how many generations have passed, but a line through men does not, and that after two centuries, documents rarely survive. Genetics can sometimes confirm ancestry, he said, but it does not establish halachic status. He described the case of a chala descendant who underwent conversion in France and still faced serious problems having his status recognized in Israel.

State and halacha

Mavashev said Israel’s Law of Return and halacha answer different questions: a person may have a legal right to immigrate and become a citizen without being recognized as Jewish under halacha, a distinction that becomes practical in matters such as religious marriage.

Asked whether widening the definition risks blurring what it means to be a Jew, he agreed the danger exists and said categories should be kept distinct, among them a Jew by halacha, a person of Jewish origin, a person raised in a Jewish family, cultural identity, genetic origin and the right of return. What he asks for, he said, is a serious halachic discussion and a change in tone, so that a rabbi who must say “according to halacha you are not yet Jewish” also says, “but you are not a stranger.”

“Tradition must be preserved,” he said. “But people must be preserved too.”

In a postscript, the paper said it had asked Rabbi Baruch Babaev, chief rabbi of the Bukharian Jews of the United States and Canada, to address the halachic questions raised, and that he promised to review them and provide official comments for publication.

Sources: The Bukharian Times, “Jews by Mother, Jews by Father,” part four (Oct. 22, 2026, in Russian).