Remembering Nisim Mosheev, Samarkand School Director and Honored Teacher, on His 100th Birth Anniversary

This report was translated from Russian by Bukharian Jewish Post from a remembrance published in The Bukharian Times. The Bukharian Times marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Nisim Rubinovich Mosheev, a longtime teacher and school administrator in Samarkand’s Jewish quarter, with a first-person remembrance in its Oct. 29 edition. The writer, a neighbor and family relation who grew up on the same lane, listed Mosheev among a group of respected Samarkand figures born a century ago, including Professor Manashe Abramov, teacher Yuri Zakharovich Nektalov and historian Boris Ilyaevich Babaev. Childhood and career According to the remembrance, Mosheev’s father died before Nisim was a year old, and he was raised by his mother, Istam, and his grandmother Yaffa Pinkhasova, daughter of the Bukharian Jewish educator Shlomo Bobojon Pinkhasov (Kobuli). His great-grandfather Zevulun Mosheev left Samarkand in 1924 intending to bring the family later, but under Stalin the family could not leave and never saw him again, the writer said. Mosheev spent his childhood on a Jewish collective farm in Urgut, about 40 kilometers from Samarkand, through the hungry 1930s and the war. The writer said that wartime shortages of teachers were so acute that Mosheev briefly served as assistant principal of School No. 25 at age 16. He went on to a teachers’ college and a pedagogical institute and worked his way up at School No. 25 from youth-group leader to teacher and head of studies, later becoming director of School No. 23. He held the titles Honored Teacher of the Republic of Uzbekistan and Excellent Worker of Public Education of the Uzbek SSR, the remembrance said. Family and community Mosheev and his wife, Rena Ilyaevna Mosheeva, a nurse whom the writer described as a first responder for the whole of Shirabadskaya Street, raised four sons: Roshel, Amnun (now deceased), Lev and Slava. The writer said Mosheev had kept manuscripts with the aim of writing a book, a wish fulfilled by his son Roshel in the book Khotira (Memory). He was remembered as an orator who quoted Tajik poetry and classical literature, and as a figure respected among Tajiks and Uzbeks as well as Bukharian Jews. After retiring he worked with the international Jewish charitable foundations that opened in Samarkand, the writer said, and in 1991, when a group of activists at the city’s Jewish center sought to hold a public “trial” of the writer, Mosheev was the only one who spoke in his defense, according to the account. Mosheev and his wife emigrated to the United States on Oct. 21, 1993. He died three months later, on Jan. 27, 1994, at 68, according to the remembrance. Sources: The Bukharian Times, “Nisim Mosheev: A Heart Left in Samarkand,” Oct. 29, 2026 (in Russian).