Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Jewish Refugees Evacuated from the Soviet Union, 1941-1942

Historical Background:

During WWII, more than one million Jews from the former Soviet Union, including the recently annexed territories of Eastern Poland, the Baltic countries, Bessarabia, and northern Bukovina, were evacuated by the Soviet authorities or managed to escape on their own into the Soviet interior before German troops marched into their towns and villages. A significant group of evacuees, including many Jewish families, arrived in Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tadzhikistan, and Turkmenistan) in 1941-1942.

About this Database:

In 2004-2006, a group of local researchers of the Central Asia Research Project, led by Professor Saidjon Kurbanov, selected and digitized 152,000 registration cards of Jewish evacuees and refugees available at the Central State Archives of the Republic of Uzbekistan in Tashkent. With the funding provided by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Professor Kurbanov and his colleagues in Tashkent compiled a database consisting of 152,000 names of Jewish evacuees, along with the digital images of their registration cards.

According to the information provided by Professor Kurbanov, registration cards list only those who came directly to Tashkent and then went to different localities in Uzbekistan. The card catalog and database do not include those who arrived at other localities within the Uzbek Republic, as well as significant number of Jews and non-Jews who came to Tashkent after February 1942 — including people joining their family in Uzbekistan from other parts of Soviet Union.

This database is based on the card catalog of evacuees stored in the Central State Archives of the Republic of Uzbekistan in Tashkent: Information contained in the database includes:

• Name — Family Name (Surname) and Given Name(s)


• Birth Year — The person's year of birth


• Gender — The person's sex. "M" = male; "Zh" = female


• Town — Town from which this person was evacuated


• Oblast — Oblast (province) from which this person was evacuated. This is often just an abbreviation ("BSSR" = Belarusian SSR; "USSR" = Ukrainian SSR; "MSSR" = Moldovan SSR; "RSFSR" = Russian SSR), or an oblast name in its adjectival form.


• Rayon — Rayon (district) from which this person was evacuated. This field is rarely filled in. When it is, the rayon name is usually in its adjectival form


• ID # — Clicking on this ID number will bring up an image of the original card, in Cyrillic