Jewish history in Karaganda from Karlag to post-Soviet communities

Karaganda emerged as a new Soviet industrial city

Unlike Semipalatinsk or Verny, Karaganda was not an old Jewish centre from before the revolution. The modern city developed primarily around the rapid exploitation of the coal basin in the 1930s.

Karaganda’s master plan shows how quickly the city grew. Its population rose from around 15 thousand in 1930 to 102 thousand in 1936. Karaganda received city status on 10 February 1934. Miners, engineers, geologists, builders, doctors, teachers and other specialists came to the city and nearby workers’ settlements from different parts of the USSR.

People came to Karaganda on job assignments after graduating from higher education or to build mines. Others included families evacuated during the war, people released from camps and special settlements, people barred from living in other cities, and those moving with their families to an industrial centre.

Karaganda’s Jewish population came from different groups

The Karaganda corrective labour camp was established in 1930 and occupied a vast area of central Kazakhstan. Its administrative centre was in Dolinka. The camp system was closely connected to the region’s economy and infrastructure, and many victims of repression did pass through Karaganda Region.

The presence of Jews among Karlag’s prisoners is documented.

Karlag researcher Nurlan Dulatbekov reconstructed one specific case from special prosecutor’s office records. Rabbi Itsko Geshelevich Tverskoy was arrested in Kyiv in December 1937, exiled to Atbasar for five years in 1939, and arrested again in 1941, sentenced to ten years and sent to Karlag. His file preserves information about his ethnicity and religious role, as well as letters from his wife seeking information about the elderly prisoner’s condition.

The history of Karlag’s Jewish prisoners does not explain the origins of Karaganda’s entire Jewish community. People reached the city by other routes too.

Jews worked in industry, institutes and medicine

The Mitzvat Emet project, summarising Alexander Abramovich’s study “On the History of the Jews of Karaganda”, provides archival figures for the postwar civilian professional workforce. Between 1947 and 1954, 41 of the 644 permanent staff of the Karagandaugol combine who received personal professional ranks were Jewish; the publication gives the proportion as 6.1%. In 1951, 22 of the 93 employees awarded personal ranks at the Karagandagiproshakht institute were Jewish.

The same account reports that Jews formed a substantial part of the professorial staff in the early years of the Karaganda Medical Institute.

These are archival staffing figures for individual institutions, cited in a historical and genealogical publication, rather than a current estimate of Karaganda’s Jewish population.

They show that Jewish life in Karaganda extended beyond the camp system. Jewish engineers, doctors, teachers and mining specialists contributed to the development of the civilian industrial city itself.

Evacuated families arrived in Karaganda during the war

During the Second World War, evacuated families and those who fled east on their own came to the city.

Sources describe in detail the family of Rochel Pinson, who would later serve for many years as a Chabad emissary. According to her recollections, the family managed to leave besieged Leningrad and arrived in Karaganda shortly before Passover. They escaped German occupation but faced severe hunger and difficult living conditions in the wartime rear; the family had almost no food for their first Passover there.

Karaganda’s wartime history includes evacuation, flight as refugees, deportation, individual exile and imprisonment in camps.

Former victims of repression, evacuees and specialists lived in postwar Karaganda

The large coal industry, design institutes, medicine, education and the relative possibility of finding work made the city an important centre of central Kazakhstan.

For former victims of repression, remaining in the region after release could sometimes be linked to restrictions on living elsewhere and the availability of work. For evacuated families, returning west after the war did not always mean recovering their former lives either. At the same time, specialists continued to arrive through ordinary Soviet channels.

A Jewish urban milieu developed that cannot be reduced to one wave of migration.

Dalny Park Cemetery contains Jewish burials from several generations. The current JewishGen JOWBR genealogical database holds 339 records and gives a date range of 1869 to 2017, using data from the Mitzvat Emet project.

A single record dated 1869 does not prove the existence of an organised Jewish community in nineteenth-century Karaganda. Such a conclusion would require verification of the record, the history of the section and the origins of the burial.

Cultural revival began in Karaganda in 1991, before the current synagogue

The Mitsva Association’s archive reports that the Miriam Jewish Cultural Centre was established in Karaganda in 1991.

The centre organised Jewish holidays in the city and its satellite towns, Yiddish and Hebrew classes, lectures and cultural programmes. The source specifically recalls an early public celebration of Rosh Hashanah in Maikuduk and describes the centre as an umbrella body bringing together other Jewish organisations in the city.

The post-Soviet revival of organised Jewish life in Karaganda began many years before the opening of the current Chabad synagogue building.

The archived catalogue describes the centre’s historical circumstances; it does not confirm its present leadership or programmes.

Hesed and the JCC provided social welfare and community activities

In Karaganda’s older institutional network, Hesed Miriam and the Shemesh Jewish Community Centre, supported by JDC or “the Joint”, worked alongside the cultural centre.

Their programmes included assistance for older people, veterans’ and family clubs, a library, Jewish history and traditions, youth work and social activities. The archived description of the veterans’ club includes war veterans, former ghetto prisoners, a woman who survived the siege of Leningrad and home-front workers. Members had different wartime experiences.

The name Shemesh is still used today. In June 2024, JDC published a report from Karaganda about the Shemesh Jewish Community Center it supports, which runs the Shatil teenage club and programmes connecting young people with older community members.

These publications confirm the continued use of the Shemesh name and the community programmes, but do not establish legal continuity between the present centre and the organisation in the older directory.

Civic and cultural bodies exist separately from religious institutions

The current Karaganda Region page of the Assembly of the People of Kazakhstan lists two Jewish organisations separately.

• The Karaganda branch of a national Jewish charitable public association. Its name includes the words “Care Centre” and “Hesed Polina”.

• The public association “Karaganda Centre of Jewish Culture”.

Both organisations are listed at the House of Friendship, 64 Shakhtyorov Avenue.

Alongside the synagogue at 80 Zhambyl Street, Karaganda has social welfare, charitable and ethnocultural organisations.

Jewish life in Karaganda involves several organisations with different roles and is not limited to Chabad.

Religious life gained a separate building in 2015

On 11 June 2015, Kazinform reported the opening of the Chabad Lubavitch Karaganda synagogue at 80 Zhambyl Street and the introduction of a new Torah scroll. Construction was funded by Alexander Mashkevich; the synagogue was dedicated to the memory of his parents, Anton and Rachel Mashkevich.

The synagogue’s opening added to the Jewish cultural and social infrastructure already developed in Karaganda.

Today, Chabad Kazakhstan lists a synagogue, mikvah, dining room and classrooms at its Karaganda centre. Rabbi Asher and Rachel Tumarkin run the centre. Its address is unchanged: 80 Zhambyl Street.

The community’s current legal entity was registered in 2016

The current state register includes the Local Religious Association “Jewish Community of Karaganda Region”.

An aggregated record citing open eGov data gives its registration date as 21 April 2016, its address as 80 Zhambyl Street and its head as Sergey Yegorov. The aggregator reports checking the data on 28 July 2026. This date does not mean that the editorial team obtained a primary registry extract. The official Register of Mandatory Requirements also includes the organisation with business identification number 160440024052.

The 2016 registration date refers to the current religious legal entity. The synagogue opened a year earlier, the cultural centre had existed since 1991, and the city’s Jewish population formed much earlier.

Chabad in Karaganda also predates the 2015 building

In 2008, the Lubavitch World Headquarters archive reported the planned arrival of a permanent Chabad emissary family in Karaganda. The same article mentioned the existing Ohr Avner Jewish school, with roughly a hundred pupils, whose building housed the city’s prayer hall at that time.

The estimate of pupil numbers relates to 2008; the source does not give the school’s current enrolment.

Post-Soviet cultural and social organisations preceded the educational and prayer venues of the 2000s. By 2008, Chabad was preparing for the arrival of a permanent emissary family. A new synagogue opened in 2015, and a religious centre operates in the city today.

Dalny Park Cemetery holds burials from several generations

The burials at Dalny Park preserve the memory of several generations of families.

In 2018, local Jewish organisations began systematically cataloguing Jewish graves; by 2020, more than 300 burials had reportedly been recorded. JewishGen JOWBR currently holds 339 records from this collection.

For now, 1869 is treated as catalogue data for an individual burial, rather than a proven foundation date for a Jewish cemetery or an organised community in Karaganda. Such a conclusion requires local archival verification.

The histories of Karaganda and Karlag are connected but distinct

There were Jews among Karlag’s prisoners. Karaganda’s Jewish history also includes industrial work, family lives and the community activities of different generations.

• Coal industry engineers and designers;

• miners and builders;

• doctors and teachers;

• families evacuated from the western USSR;

• people who arrived after the war;

• the children and grandchildren of these families;

• participants in the cultural revival of the 1990s;

• today’s synagogue congregants and participants in the JCC, Hesed and ethnocultural organisations.

The stories of Karlag’s prisoners form one part of the Jewish history of the Karaganda region.

Karaganda’s organisations and important dates

The city’s Soviet history. Karaganda grew rapidly as an industrial centre from the 1930s onwards. The arrival of specialists was one of the main mechanisms of growth.

Repression. Individual archival histories confirm the presence of Jews among the region’s prisoners and exiles. Rabbi Itsko Tverskoy, for example, was sent to Karlag in 1941.

Wartime evacuation. Sources document Jewish families who arrived in Karaganda during the Second World War, including Rochel Pinson’s family from Leningrad.

The professional workforce. Archival and historical studies record substantial Jewish participation in postwar Karaganda’s coal industry, engineering design and medicine.

Cultural revival. The Mitsva archive dates the establishment of the Miriam centre to 1991.

JDC/JCC. JDC’s contemporary report from 2024 confirms the Shemesh JCC name and the presence of youth programmes.

Ethnocultural and social infrastructure. The current Assembly of the People of Kazakhstan page lists the Karaganda Centre of Jewish Culture and the Karaganda branch of the association whose name combines “Care Centre” and “Hesed Polina”.

The synagogue. The current Chabad building at 80 Zhambyl Street opened in June 2015.

The religious legal entity. The Jewish Community of Karaganda Region is active. Its current registration record is dated 21 April 2016.

Chabad. The active centre provides a synagogue, mikvah, dining room and spaces for learning and community activities. The current description names Asher Tumarkin as its rabbi.

The cemetery. Dalny Park’s Jewish burials have been catalogued, and JOWBR holds 339 records. No municipal document establishing the Jewish section’s legal status and exact boundaries has been found.

In brief

• The 1930s. Karaganda grows rapidly as a new coal and industrial city; Karlag operates in the region at the same time.

• From 1937 to 1941. Rabbi Itsko Tverskoy’s archival history demonstrates the presence of Jewish victims of repression in the Karaganda camp system.

• From 1941 to 1945. Evacuated Jewish families arrive in the city; they are not Karlag prisoners.

• The postwar decades. Jewish specialists work in coal mining, design organisations, medicine and other civilian fields.

• 1991. The Mitsva archive dates the establishment of the Miriam cultural centre to this year.

• 2008. A Chabad source records preparations for a permanent emissary presence and the existence of the Ohr Avner school with a prayer hall at that time.

• 11 June 2015. The new Chabad Lubavitch Karaganda synagogue opens.

• 21 April 2016. The present Local Religious Association “Jewish Community of Karaganda Region” is registered. This is the legal entity’s date, not the beginning of the city’s Jewish history.

• From 2018 to 2020. Cataloguing of Dalny Park’s Jewish burials begins, with more than 300 records entered.

• 2024. JDC documents the active Shemesh JCC and the Shatil youth club.

• 2026. Sources confirm the active religious community and Chabad at 80 Zhambyl Street, as well as ethnocultural and social infrastructure through the Assembly of the People of Kazakhstan.