To get to Spain was, I must admit, the dream of my whole life. There were many business trips to different countries of the world, but it seemed to be the limit of my desires to get to the homeland of my idols – Moshe ben Maimon Rambam, Miguel de Cervantes, Velázquez, Goya, El Greco, Pablo Picasso, Manuel de Falla, Federico Lorca, Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Antoni Gaudí, Paco de Lucía, Almodóvar…
The glorious names of people who determined the course of history of both European and world culture. The most beautiful cities: Madrid, Barcelona, Seville…
And now the dream has come true: I’m in Spain! The reason for the trip was the wedding of representatives of the Querub-Caro and Ileyasoff families — Moroccan and Bukharian Jews, Andrs and Ylana, which became a true event of the year for me. The uniqueness is that the descendants of Sephardic, or rather Moroccan Jews, who were related to Bukharian Jews since the end of the 18th century, first got married not in Shakhrisabz, Bukhara, Samarkand, not in Jerusalem, New York, Milan, Buenos Aires or Vienna, but…in the capital of Spain.
Synagogue Beit Yacov, Calle de Balmes 3, Madrid—I am writing the address of the synagogue so that everyone who happens to be in Madrid can find it and pray.
This is exactly what the young guys from New York, Ilya and Zoya Mavashev, Avrom and Dina Kaykov, whom I met there, did. Ilya was supposed to read Kaddish for his late father, and they all came to Spain together to spend their vacation there.
I must admit that I felt some excitement on my way to the synagogue, which is located in the depths of Balmes Street and does not stand out from other buildings in the Jewish quarter of Madrid. As elsewhere in Europe, synagogues are protected by the state. And after the events of October 7, 2023, especially in Spain, this takes on special significance.
The guard peered at us for a long time, carefully checked the documents and only then allowed us to pass through the turnstile. The synagogue building occupies several floors, on which offices and Hebrew classes are located.
The beautiful prayer hall is divided into two parts, as it should be in an Orthodox synagogue: the top floor for the women, the ground floor for the men.
I must admit that I was nervous, looking at the faces of the parishioners, among whom there are many young people. The service was conducted by Rabbi Moshe Bendahan. All the familiar texts, all the prayers sounded in the Sephardic pronunciation, and it felt as if I had come to my own synagogue.
I was worried for a reason. On Friday, July 5, I was at a Shabbat prayer service in the country where on March 31, 1492, the Edict of the Alhambra was signed, a decree by Their Royal Majesties, Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, for the complete expulsion from all territories of their kingdoms of those Jews who refused to accept Christianity before July 31 of that year. Jews were banned!
But now they are here again in Spain, just as they are in other European countries, despite the efforts of Hitler’s Nazi Germany during World War II to exterminate all Jews. We are, we have been, and will be!
Here is an interesting fact for you. The president of the community, Estrella Bengio, turned out to be the daughter-in-law of Victoria Caro Cohen, who is a direct descendant of Rabbi Joseph ben Ephraim Caro (1488, Toledo or Zamora – 1575, Safed), a major authority and teacher of religion in the 16th century, the author of the fundamental code of halakhic injunctions «Shulchan Aruch» («The Set Table»). This handbook for every Jew bring s together all the rules of daily life that we must follow in accordance with the religious practice of Judaism.
And here I am in the same synagogue with his descendants. They meet on the eve of the wedding of their granddaughter Ylana, who is marrying the Bukharian Jew Andres Aron-Yosef, one of the descendants of Rabbi Yosef Mammon Maghribi, who arrived in Bukhara from Safed in 1793. And I, on my mother’s side, one of the Musaevs, whose roots also go back to this outstanding figure of the Enlightenment, am now present at Shabbat in Madrid and have the opportunity to get acquainted with many of my very distant relatives.
That same evening, a young representative of the New York community, Ilyusha Mavashev, was in the synagogue with his wife. He came to the synagogue with his friend Avrom Kaykov to recite Kaddish in memory of his father, as already mentioned, and was also pleasantly surprised to see me.
Bukharian Jews, Mizrahis, and Eastern Jews of Asia are closely related to the Sephardim, descendants of immigrants from Spain and North Africa. And thanks to this kinship, many interesting, important turns have taken place in our history, literature and culture.
It was nice to see Victoria Caro-Cohen sitting on her chair on the second, women’s floor of the synagogue and greeting all the parishioners with a happy smile and a gentle gesture, including us, the guests of the upcoming celebration, whom she had not known before. It was amazing how much goodness and peace this woman carried in her soul, who became, in accordance with her name, a winner — the winner of time. She felt confident as a Jew and as a citizen of royal Spain.
After 1492, there were no Jews in the country for a long time. But they loved Spain, and many could not fall out of love with it. As Rabbi Baruch Gorin wrote, «This veil was not devoid of mythmaking, but something in love for the ‘good mother’ turned into the ‘evil stepmother’ has haunted the Jews throughout history.»
All of Spain’s wealth
I’d throw a pile of rubbish
And he would fall and bury himself
Into the dust of the ruined Temple
Rabbi Yehuda Halevi,
translated by Vladimir Lazaris
So, there were six of us there who were one-hundred percent Bukharian Jewish: the author of these lines, Imanuel Rybakov, Grigory Akbashev and their wives were invited to Madrid, to the wedding of Andres (Aron Yosef) Ileyassoff, a native of Buenos Aires, now a resident of Milan, who chose to marry the beautiful Ylana Querub Bengio, the daughter of the president of the Jewish community of the Spanish capital. Our company was joined by the descendants of the great Bukharian Mullo Niyoz Rafael Ricardo Ileyassoff (Ilyasov), who speaks Italian and French (it’s a pity that Aron Aronov was not with us!), but does not speak Bukhari and English.
Plus Jewish mestizos: the American Vera Pinkhasova, in addition to speaking English, is brilliant in French and Italian. She came with her son Michael, an English-speaking lawyer from Manhattan.
I met Professor Pablo Pinchas-zadeh from Buenos Aires (also speaks Russian, his mother is an Ashkenazi from Kiev). At this celebration, they did not feel like strangers. Later, I put him on the phone with David Mavashev, and they immediately figured out their close relationship and exchanged phone numbers.
I wrote about the groom, Andres Ileyassoff (a descendant of the Ilyasovs) in our newspaper and received a lot of responses: the fate of the Bukharian Jewish immigrants from Samarkand and Bukhara, who left the USSR at the dawn of Soviet power, did not leave anyone indifferent. Moreover, a hundred years later, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, despite the difficult vicissitudes of fate and wandering through the cities of America and Europe, were able to preserve their Jewish identity. And Andresclearly positions himself as a Bukharian Jew!
Especially for the wedding, he bought four jomas with Jewish symbols in New York, so that, dressed in them, he could proudly walk around the hall and dance at the wedding.
This is how his relative, Imonuel Rybakov, explained the origin of this family to me:
Andres (Aron Yosef) Ileyassoff is named after his great-great-grandfather Aron and great-grandfather Yosef Pinkhasov. He is my fifth cousin on the side of my grandfather, Abram Rybakov. Andresand I are both descendants of Rabbi Pinchas Mullo Niyoz (Hakata), Kalontar of the Jews of the Emirate of Bukhara, and Sephardic Rabbi Yosef Mamon Maarawi. ANDERS’s ancestors from 1914 lived in the United States, then settled in France, and with the outbreak of World War II, moved to Argentina.
His great-grandmother’s sister, Frekho Mavasheva, remained in Tashkent, constantly keeping in touch with relatives. The story of the founder of this family, Aron Pinkhasov (Mullo Niyoz), called the «Bukharian Rothschild,» was described by me in the book, «The Merchant Class of Bukharan Jews.»
By order of Andres, several dozen copies of the books were sent to Argentina and Italy to grateful relatives. One of them, Dr. Pablo (Shaul) Penchaszadeh (born in 1944), a zoologist, Ph.D., came to the wedding from Buenos Aires with his daughter Anna, his son-in-law, and two grandchildren. He speaks a little Russian, was able to obtain Spanish citizenship, as a descendant of Spanish Jews.
The founder of the Ilyasov family was Ilyosi Samarqandi. One of his sons, Yadidia Ilyasov, was a merchant of the second guild, an industrialist, and a manufactory trader. He is the great-grandfather of Andres’ father, Ricardo (Rafael) Ileyassoff. During Andres’ visit to Samarkand in 2023 to participate in the events on the occasion of the 145th anniversary of the death of the leader of Samarkand Moshe Kalontarov, with the help of David Arkadyevich Kalontarov (Israel), we found several graves of his relatives buried next to the site of Moshe Kalontar.
I met Andresfor the first time in Samarkand and introduced him to many relatives from the Isaharov side who came to Uzbekistan from Israel, Germany, and the United States. I witnessed his delight at everything that he saw in the Golden Samarkand Hotel during the solemn introduction of a new Torah scroll. He was impressed by his participation in the conference in the Kalontarov house-estate, the exposition of the museum, the majestic melodies of Bukhara Shashmaqam, and a visit to Siab Bazaar.
Then, when he was in New York, he met with me to invite me to a wedding in Madrid, and I accepted the offer.
The wedding took place in a magnificent hall, which was located outside of Madrid. I was delighted with the design. It was devoid of pomposity. An abundance of white flowers, and the ceiling is decorated with wildflowers, from which some kind of spring aroma emanated. A chamber string quintet played popular classical works by European composers mixed with Jewish and Spanish melodies. There are no huge bouquets of flowers that indicate bad taste, which are characteristic of Latin Americans from Colombia or Mexico and which are often seen at the weddings of Bukharian Jews in New York.
YLANA and Andres are a beautiful couple. They were clearly happy. But the happiest that evening were the groom’s parents, Rafael and Teresa Ileyassoff, their joy was shared by the youngest son Hernán, who constantly accompanied his father. He came to the wedding from Rome, and his parents from Venice.
Ylana’s groom’s parents are well-known people in the city’s Jewish community: Simón Rafael Querub Caro, son of Moses Querub, founder of the Jewish community of Madrid and the Beit Yakob synagogue (1968), and head of the Chevra Kadisha burial house
The wedding of Spanish Jews in Madrid has one but very significant and fundamental difference from our Bukharian Jewish weddings. Musicians or DJs perform several times for 45-50 minutes. Then there is a break, light music sounds, and the guests communicate (by the way, at the wedding of my son Boris, I also asked Johan to follow this rule, and he fully fulfilled my wish). Thus, the youth hysteria of the disco disappears and there is communication with relatives, and during the break, parents address the guests on the microphone, express their good wishes, bless the children.
Simón Raphael Querub-Caro in his greeting, which was read out in Spanish, mentioned that representatives of different cities – Samarkand, Bukhara, Madrid, Rome, Milan, New York, Buenos Aires – as well as different ethnic groups of Jews – Sephardim, Mizrahi, Ashkenazim – are present in the hall. This testifies to the revival of Jewish life in Madrid, which became a new center for the development of the Sephardic community in Spain. There are almost 7,000 people in it today. He recently opened the Jewish school for high school students, and this will have good consequences for the country’s growing community.
I was happy for the future children of the newlyweds, who have such excellent prospects for Jewish life.
Then came the most exciting moment of the wedding celebration. From both sides, the bride, dressed in the outfit of a Moroccan Jewess, and the groom in a white Bukharian robe, trimmed with gold patterns and Jewish symbols, descended the stairs leading to the hall.
They went into the hall and began to dance oriental dances. As Andreslater told me, his wife did not immediately enter the musical rhythms of Bukharian Jews, and it was proposed to dance to Moroccan music mixed with Israeli music. But we, the delegates of Bukharian-Jewish New York, still did not change our traditional dance gestures and joined this Pyrenean fiesta. We were joined by the only Ashkenazi rabbi, Zalman Springer Lazar, who was present at the wedding, the nephew of the Chief Rabbi of Russia Berel Lazar.
He was happy with the presence of Bukharan Jews, remembered with a kind word our president Lev Leviev, who does a lot for Chabad.
«I come from Rome, where ANDERS’s brother, Hernán, lives,» he told me. «And in some ways, I am an indirect culprit in this celebration.» In my opinion, this is an ideal couple, and they are very suitable for each other not only externally, but also internally and strive to preserve their Jewish roots and resist assimilation.
Zalman Springer Lazar was photographed as a souvenir and sent the pictures to his eminent uncle in Moscow and Rabbi Wolowik in New York.
Madrid – New York
Rafael Nektalov,
photos by R. Sharkey,
I. Rybakov and the archive
of the Ileyassoff family.
(To be continued.)