Shashmaqam: The Music That Still Ties Bukharian Prayer Halls to Central Asia

Ask what makes Bukharian culture audible, and musicians will point to Shashmaqam—and to the way those melodies migrate into synagogue song.

On Manashe Khaimov’s Jewish Silk Road Tours, participants hear the Shashmaqam Ensemble, affiliated with the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, which describes the repertoire as a cultural symbiosis of Jewish and Muslim tunes. Percussion such as tar and doire, accordions, and clarinets accompany lyrics drawn from Persian poetry. Khaimov told the Forward that related tunes are often readapted to Jewish prayers, including Shabbat songs like Shalom Aleichem.

That living tradition surfaced again at the July 20 memorial for Uriel Kandkhorov at Da Mikelle Palazzo, where The Bukharian Times described performances by Emmanuel Israilov and Avrom Tolmasov, and a rendering of “Sayyora” by Roshel Rubinov and Ilyusha Khavasov that one guest called “our song”—a bird-and-exile metaphor long meaningful to Bukharians who left Central Asia for Israel and the United States.

In an era when language shift and assimilation worry educators, music remains one of the most portable vessels of heritage: teachable to children born in Queens, playable at weddings and yushvos, and recognizable across the Israel–Diaspora divide.

Memorials and weddings alike still book singers who can move a room between Hebrew prayer modes and Central Asian maqom. That repertoire is one reason heritage educators argue music education belongs beside language and culinary classes in any serious continuity agenda for the next generation.

Sources: The Forward; The Bukharian Times. AI-generated editorial illustration accompanying this report; not a documentary photograph or official promotional image.