BUKHARA, Uzbekistan -- Drums beating, horns wailing, a family circus summons the throngs from the nearby bazaar, which is laden with silks and spices and velvety, pointy-toed slippers festooned with gold and jewellike stones.

Passers-by cup their hands in prayer as the family's 5-year-old prepares to jump into a pile of broken glass. Children run up, offering him money. A 12th-century shrine, with a large, cone-shaped dome added by the conqueror Tamerlane in 1380, provides the backdrop to the dusty stage.

This could be the Silk Road 1,000 years ago. But if Bukhara's face appears largely unchanged, the same cannot be said of its soul. This city, once the heart of a great Islamic empire, has also been the center of a vibrant Jewish community for 2,000 years.

Today, that Jewish community is on its way to extinction. During the Soviet years, more than 10,000 Jews lived here; now, there are fewer than 1,000. As they watch their friends and neighbors leave, those who remain are trying to regain their faith.

Late on a Sunday afternoon, a dozen young women walk the narrow, winding lanes of the ancient city toward a newly opened synagogue, the second since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of official atheism. They gather around a long table.

"We study three times a week," says Stella Davidova, a 22-year-old accountant. "We're learning Hebrew and Jewish traditions."

They sound optimistic. The authorities allow them to freely practice their religion. While some Muslims are persecuted because the government accuses them of fundamentalism, Jews are not perceived as a threat. Uzbekistan has not experienced the virulent anti-Semitism that has been re-emerging in Russia. "Our president won't allow fascism," Davidova says.

Just as it begins to sound as if the young women are rooted here, they begin to talk about the future. And every one of them has either concrete plans to leave soon or hopes to leave eventually.

"I'm moving to Queens," Davidova says. "We don't have a future here."

The discrimination is subtle, they say, but it results in hardship and difficulty finding jobs in a country that is struggling economically. Jews are considered a separate nationality, and they feel left out of Uzbekistan's future.

'Not our soil'

"This is not our soil," says Nina Yunaeva, 18, who is also planning to join relatives in Queens.

Their synagogue was built 200 years ago, says Gabriel Matatov, the rabbi, and was used as a synagogue until 1938, when Stalinist authorities closed it. It was turned into a clothing workshop, named after Stalin, and then an apartment building.

"Bukhara had 13 synagogues before the revolution," says Matatov, who grew up observing Jewish traditions at home, in strictest secrecy.

Their ancestors came from Persia 2,000 years ago, they say. The Bukhara Jews have persevered through the glory and decline of numerous empires, Arab, Mongol, Turkic, Russian.

Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane all made their way here. The Saracens who captured Jerusalem in A.D 637 took over Bukhara in A.D. 709. Genghis Khan massacred most of the city's residents in 1219. The Uzbeks arrived in 1506, adopted Islam and forced the Jews to pay an annual tax because they were unbelievers. Historians record that as Jews paid the tax, they were slapped in the face, a reminder of their status.

The Jewish cemetery a few blocks away -- named Forty Years of October Cemetery -- has Jewish graves going back many, many generations. The young women say they don't feel any pain at leaving this, their people's home for all those centuries.

"We have another path," Davidova says. "I don't think it is sad for us."

All Jews are meant to live in Israel eventually, Yunaeva says. Queens will be only a stop on her way to that Promised Land. "So we won't grieve when we leave here," she says. "It is necessary for me, for my family, to leave."

Only a 12-year-old girl named Maya says she has no prospects of leaving. She, her mother and 14-year-old brother live on their grandmother's pension of a few dollars a month.

In a hand-me-down suit of her brother's, Maya looks like a boy. She and her brother do odd jobs around the synagogue to earn a little money for bread. Only people like her, who have no way out, will stay, Maya says.

No one knows what will happen to 2,000 years of history here, says Matatov, the rabbi. "Only God knows."

And life goes on in Bukhara.

Next to the bazaar, the 5-year-old, Abdurakman Tishabayev, jumps off his ladder, barefoot, into the pile of broken glass, turns a triumphant cartwheel and puts his shoes on, apparently uninjured. Another performer hoists the child on his shoulders and carries Abdurakman through the crowd, collecting money.

His grandfather, Kasem Abdullayev, waves his cane in approval and signals for the next act. "We could not force him to do this if he didn't want to," Abdullayev says. "He was born to do it."

Abdullayev started at age 6 in the circus, and he's still on the road at 91, orchestrating the performance. He has one grandson jumping up and down on a tightrope. Then the little boy's father, Mubin, comes on. Mubin loads two men and weights adding up to 770 pounds on an iron bar and picks them up, lifting with a bit held in his mouth.

Just before an intermission, Mubin picks up his little boy by the ankles. Abdurakman holds himself stiff, stretched out with one elbow bent under his head, as if about to fall asleep -- in midair, 4 feet off the ground.

The crowd begins to drift away.

'Tourism is nothing now'

In Soviet times, Bukhara was a busy tourist destination. British tourists loved to stare into the Bug Pit, where two British adventurers caught up in the diplomatic intrigue of the 19th century -- Col. Charles Stoddart and Capt. Arthur Conolly -- were held captive. The emir who ruled Bukhara let bugs and rats crawl over them in the pit, before putting them to death in 1842.

"Americans were interested in shopping," says Alexander Boltayev, a former tour guide who runs two small bed-and-breakfast hotels. "We used to have 300 to 500 tourists a day. Compared to the 1980s, tourism is nothing now."

Tourism was curtailed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Uzbek officials, based in the unlovely Soviet-built capital of Tashkent, made it difficult to travel here. Now, they are trying once more to attract visitors.

Those who do make it here will find a recently and pleasantly renovated airport. If they have traveled elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, they will be astounded by the modern, comfortable touches in Boltayev's hotels.

Then they will walk through the city. The old man selling hats would have looked much the same a century ago. The spice vendor suggests the caravans that plodded along the Silk Road of old with those same spices.

"We call Tashkent a city of the 20th century," Boltayev says. "But Bukhara is a city of the 16th century."

And so it is, except for the Jews who are so steadily leaving.

Pub Date: 3/14/99