Birth Certificate: Abrasha Levaevich Il’yasov (Uzbekistan)

This birth certificate (No. 3764683) in Russian and Uzbek was issued on 15 February 1940 by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs. The form was filled out, stamped and signed by the head and a clerk of the local Bureau of the State registry office (ZAGS) in Samarkand for the new born “citizen” Abrasha Levaevich Il'yasov. The son of Lev Il'yasov and Rakhel’ Muradovna Il'yasova was born in Samarkand on 25 December 1939. Abrasha (a variant of Abraham common among Central Asian Jews) was the fourth of their six children. He spent his whole life in Samarkand, where he worked as an inner-city bus driver until his retirement in the Mid-1990s. Dyadya “Uncle” Arkadi (a Russianized variant of Abrasha) as he was known in the town’s Bukharan Jewish community, kept the birth certificate in a drawer of his living room cupboard.

As indicated in a handwritten addendum to the birth certificate, his father was registered as stateless (без гражданства) at the time of Abrasha’s birth. He retained this status until his death in 1977. In 1905, his family had moved from Herat in Afghanistan to Marv in Russian Turkestan (and today’s Turkmenistan). Lev was born there in 1912. One year later, the trader family moved on to Kerki, a border town on the territory of the Bukharan Emirate. In 1937, all Jewish families were forced to leave this town and Abrasha’s father decided to join some relatives in Samarkand. Shortly before this, the passport system was introduced in the Soviet Union. This administrative procedure caused various problems for the responsible state authorities. Birth certificates were unknown in the region, as were family names or nationality. However, all this had to be indicated in the new document.

Muhammadjon-i Shakuri (1925-2012), son of the Bukharan enlightener and former judge (qāḍī) Sadr-i Ziyo, who was to become a leading Tajik intellectual after the Second World War, remembers the retrospective issuing of birth certificates and the introduction of passports in the Mid-1930s as follows:
“It turned out that we did not even have birth certificates. In the Emirate of Bukhara [where I was born], this kind of document did not exist. Therefore, neither the day of birth was known, nor the year, nor the month.

In order to determine the date of birth, all pupils in Bukhara went through a medical commission ... The day when it was the turn of my school and my class was the thirtieth of October ... We were taken to an examination room. The medical commission looked at my teeth, the fuzz under my armpits and so on ... They examined me and then said: your year of birth is 1926. I said I was born in 1925. In a poem my father wrote on the occasion of my birth, there is the phrase “sa'dakhtar bodo”, which means “may he be fortunate” and, according to the abjad-method [each letter of the Arabic alphabet correlates with a specific numerical value], this phrase refers to the year 1343 of the Hijra calendar, which corresponds to the years 1924-1925 in the Christian calendar.

They said, no, all previous documents are no longer valid. From now on, your year of birth is 1926. The day the medical commission met was the thirtieth of October and I was told that the thirtieth of October is your birthday. Then they asked me from whose name my family name “Sharifov” was derived. And I said from my father, Sharifjon-i Makhdum ... Then they asked: what is your grandfather's name? My grandfather's name is Qozi Abdushukur. So from now on your family name is “Shukurov”. The family name had to be formed from the grandfather's name. And Sharifovich becomes the patronymic (Russ. ochestvo). Your first name remains as it is: Muhammad. This is how I became Muhammad Sharifovich Shakurov. It only took five minutes. When the examination by the medical commission was over, I had been transformed into a new person. Only my first name remained the same. Everything else, birthday, year of birth, month of birth and family name changed and I became a new person.”

Abrasha (Arkadi) Il'yasov, whose family history goes back to Mashhad (Iran) and Herat (Afghanistan), where his grandparents were born, died in Samarkand on 22 January 2018. He is buried in the town’s Jewish Cemetery. His gravestone bears the name Avraam (Abraham).

Bibliography:
Mirbobo Mirrahim: “Sa’dakhtar” Guftugū bo Muhammadjon-i Shakuri. Tehran [n.p.], 1380 h.sh. (2001), pp. 10-12.
Thomas Loy, Bukharan Jews in the Soviet Union. Autobiographical Narrations of Mobility, Continuity and Change. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2016.
Thomas Loy, “Arkadi Il’yasov (1939-2018)” Obituary http://www.tethys.caoss.org/arkadi-ilyasov-1939-2018/

Thomas Loy is a Research fellow, Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences