The Bukharan Quarter in Jerusalem

In 1890 seven members of the Bukharan community in Jerusalem formed a Ḥovevei Ẓiyyon association. In 1891 the association purchased land north-west of Meʾa Sheʿarim and adopted a charter requiring that the quarter be built "in the style of Europe's major cities." They named it Reḥovot, after Genesis 26:22: "for now the Lord hath made room for us."

The plan was drawn by Conrad Schick; the streets were made deliberately three times wider than Jerusalem's main thoroughfares of the day. Neo-Gothic windows, European tiled roofs, neo-Moorish arches, Italian marble.

The people and the houses, by the record. Rabbi Shlomo Moussaieff (1852, Bukhara—1922, Jerusalem), aliyah in 1888: he built a complex with flats for twenty-five poor families and four synagogues, wrote the prayer book Ḥuqqat ʿOlam, assembled a manuscript collection—Maimonides, Ḥayyim Vital—now at Bar-Ilan University, and left much of the property as a heqdesh. The Yehudayoff and Hefetz families—the "Armon," Beit Yehudayoff-Hefetz at 19 Ezra Street, built in 1907 (construction 1905–1914), neo-Renaissance; later it hosted British military functions and the founding convention of the Chief Rabbinate in 1921. Yosef Davidoff—Beit Davidoff at 10 Ha-Bukharim Street, 1906, Tuscan in style, by an Italian architect; from 1915 to 1925 it housed the Hebrew Gymnasium. Simḥa Mosheyeff, former head of the Jewish community of Turkestan—Mosheyeff House at 18 Ha-Bukharim, with four inner courtyards. The Baba Tama Synagogue was completed in 1894 and named for its Bukharan benefactor.

Later came a dairy and cotton fields in 1905–08, a Persian carpet workshop from 1920 employing eighty women; building continued into the early 1950s, some two hundred houses in all. By 1914 about fifteen hundred Bukharan Jews had settled in Palestine.

One correction. "The Bukharan Quarter was founded in 1893"—so the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906—is the date of occupancy, not of foundation: the association was formed in 1890, the land bought in 1891. 1890/1891 should be printed, noting 1893 as the older encyclopedia's date.