Getting Jews Out of Turkmenistan is Community Leader's Vital Role

[Ian David]

ASHGABAT, Turkmenistan (JTA) -- Lyuba Garbuzova, a 46-year-old grandmother of two, was arrested late last year and detained by authorities in Uzbekistan on charges of smuggling cash across the border into this Central Asian republic.

The money, provided by foreign Jews, represented six months worth of food and medical donations intended to care for the 1,200 people in Turkmenistan's mostly elderly Jewish community.

After spending two months under virtual house arrest in Uzbekistan while facing a six-year prison sentence, Garbuzova was acquitted of all charges and allowed to return to Ashgabat.

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Garbuzova insists that nothing like the anti-Semitism she encountered in her native Ukraine exists in Turkmenistan, but rather that the Jews are just one of the minorities, including ethnic Russians, who have been pushed aside by the state's preferential policies toward ethnic Turkmen.

Still, she's aware of the particular double standard f acing Turkmenistan's Jews.

"Under the Soviet Union we were like one big family," she says, but now "there's a church, there are mosques. What's wrong with having a synagogue?"

More:
http://www.cjp.org/content_display.html?ArticleID=214103