The Jewish history of a Kazakh city

Atyrau, a majority-Muslim Kazakh city in a Central Asian desert known for its history of Cossack rebellions, doesn’t sound like a very Jewish place. But in fact, it has had a Jewish presence for centuries. 

Notable Jews born in Atyrau include movie director Timur Bekmambetov, tech entrepreneur Arkady Volozh, Chabad rabbi Shimshon Romanovski and journalist Irina Pruss, who happens to be my beloved grandmother.

Over the past 30 years, Kazakhstan’s Jewish population has fallen from almost 19,000 people to about 4,000, with many emigrating to Israel, Russia, Western Europe and North America. Nevertheless, Atyrau remains one of the few Kazakh cities with an active Jewish community. Formally organized as the Jewish Ethnocultural Association — Aliyah, the community holds yearly Purim celebrations at the House of Friendship, a municipal venue established to promote multiculturalism and preserve Atyrau’s diverse heritage.

The community currently lacks a synagogue and a rabbi, but leaders of the Aliyah Association organize children’s classes on Jewish traditions and distribute Israeli-made matzos to members of the community right before Passover.

The Aliyah Association was founded in 2001. Until recently, it was headed by Pavel Tkach, a Jewish native of Atyrau who runs a small business selling measuring instruments and researches local history as a hobby. When community members celebrate religious holidays, Tkach is the one who leads the prayers. 

Today the community is led by Mikhail Schadilov, founder of an online marketing agency. Members of the community also include Nadezhda Shilman, editor-in-chief of the city’s oldest newspaper, The Caspian Commune, and Lyubov Monastyrskaya, one of its oldest reporters. 

But how did the ancestors of all these people end up in the middle of the Kazakh steppe, so far away from where most Jews of the Russian Empire lived? Founded as a Russian outpost in 1640 and initially known as Guryev, Atyrau used to be an important stop on the trade route between Central Asia and Eastern Europe. In fact, the river Ural which flows through the city was considered the border between the two continents. Historically, its right bank was known as the Samara Side and the left bank as the Bukhara Side, referring to the hometowns of merchants who would meet and trade in Atyrau. Samara is a city in European Russia, while Bukhara is in Uzbekistan. 

Some of the earliest records of a Jewish presence in Atyrau mention Persian-speaking Jewish merchants who would come there from Bukhara. However, it’s unclear if any of them ever settled there. A more established Jewish community appeared in the 1860s, when the Russian government invited Jews to the broader Uralsk region “for the development of banking and pharmacy business.”

Another reason for Jewish immigration was the location of Atyrau close to the Ural river delta which was rich in sturgeon with highly valued caviar. In the late 19th century, many Ashkenazi Jews from all over the Pale of Settlement were engaged in the fish trade. For example, Menahem Mendel Kahanovich, father of the renowned Yiddish writer Der Nister, sold smoked fish in Astrakhan, a large center of fisheries some 180 miles away from Atyrau. Eventually, some Jewish fish traders settled in Atyrau too.

Sturgeon caviar is colloquially known as “black gold” due to its color and high price. Another substance commonly nicknamed “black gold” is crude oil — and conveniently, Atyrau was rich in both. In the early Soviet years, a state-owned oil mining company was established in the city, and its first chief executive was Ruvim Friedman, a Jewish native of Vilnius. The oil industry brought a number of Jewish engineers, accountants and other professionals to the city.

During the 1920s and 1930s, when there was much hunger throughout the Soviet Union, many Russians viewed Atyrau as a desirable destination, thanks to its growing industries and natural abundance of fish. For Jews, there was another advantage: Atyrau had no history of pogroms. That was when Leyzer Krol, a native of the Belarusian shtetl Kruhlaye, and his wife Liba Kalin from Kyiv, chose to settle there. According to their great-grandson Pavel Tkach, the house of the Krol family was an informal center of Jewish life in Atyrau in the times of Soviet-era state atheism. They had a Torah scroll, and Jews from all over the city would come over on holidays to pray and celebrate together.

Jewish immigration to Atyrau wasn’t always voluntary. My great-grandmother Musya Shklar, born in Vitebsk and raised in the Belarusian shtetl Lepel, moved there in 1940 after her husband’s brother was executed during Stalin’s Great Purge and the whole family was banned from living in the Soviet Union’s largest cities, after having been labeled as “relatives of an enemy of the state.” Despite the tragic story of how they got there, my great-grandparents grew to like their new home and played a significant role in the establishment of Atyrau’s first university. By the time my grandmother Irina was born, her father Vladimir Pruss was the head of the university’s history department and his wife Musya worked there as a lecturer in world history.

The last major wave of Jewish immigrants consisted of those evacuated from the Soviet Union’s westernmost regions during World War II. According to the Yad Vashem database, over 400 Jews from Ukraine, Moldova and elsewhere were evacuated to the small town of Makat near Atyrau in 1941 and 1942. Most of them eventually left, but those who stayed include some of the oldest and most active members of the Aliyah Association. 

Despite the Jewish community’s small size and geographic isolation, its members say they feel safe and welcome in Atyrau. Many have left for Israel, but others have made the conscious decision to stay.

“Here in Kazakhstan, we have the opportunity to proudly identify with our faith and culture and to preserve them,” Aliyah Association member Surla Epstein, then 83, told journalists at a community event.

“I appreciate this because I know very well that this isn’t the case in many other countries,” Epstein added. “Gathering for our holidays with fellow diasporans, we often discuss what it’s like in Israel. We feel sympathy for the Jews living there who have to hide from missiles and send their children to war. But here we have a quiet, peaceful life and I love it that way.”