Kazakhstan opens its first kosher restaurant

Reuters

TIME TO DINE: Jewish community members have launch the Kazakhstan's first kosher restaurant in Almaty saying it symbolises their culture's revival in the mainly Muslim Central Asian state.

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Kazakhstan's first kosher restaurant has opened for business in what Jewish community leaders said was a symbol of their culture's revival in the mainly Muslim Central Asian state.

Kazakhstan, a steppe nation of 15 million with nomadic roots, has prided itself on being relatively tolerant towards other religions compared with other ex-Soviet states.

Kazakhstan's chief Rabbi Yeshayah Cohen recited a prayer and greeted community members as the brick-and-wood tavern, called "Kosher" and financed by private investors, opened in the Kazakhstan's financial capital Almaty.

"It's an important event for all of us," Cohen said as other visitors, clad in traditional black suits and hats, surveyed the restaurant's elaborately painted walls and nibbled on dishes prepared in accordance with Jewish dietary laws.

Israel's ambassador Ran Ichay said: "I used to say the best kosher restaurant in Kazakhstan is in my kitchen, but now it's obviously going to change.

"There is a need for kosher food in Kazakhstan even after 70 years of Soviet rule, and that means something," he said.

Kazakhstan's tolerance, unlike its patchier human rights record, has been praised by the West which has criticised other former Soviet states, mainly Russia, for not doing enough to fight anti-Semitism.

In its report on anti-Semitism in 2004, the US State Department quoted Kazakhstan's chief rabbi as telling officials in Brussels that "in his 10 years living in Kazakhstan, he had never faced a single case of anti-Semitism".

Community leaders said the opening of the restaurant, tucked inside an old Soviet furniture factory, was a symbolic act of closure for many of Kazakhstan's 30,000 Jews whose grandparents moved here as part of Josef Stalin's mass deportations.

Jewish communities have coexisted with Kazakhs and Uzbeks for 2000 years.

The political upheavals of Soviet rule made more than a million of Jews abandon their homes across the former Soviet Union to look for better lives in Israel and Western Europe, although there are no official numbers on Central Asia.

Community leaders in Kazakhstan said some are now coming back, lured by Kazakhstan's double-digit economic growth and echoing a similar trend in Russia.

"Jews always felt at home here, even in Soviet times," Ichay said. "That is probably because of Kazakh's nomadic past when they had little contact with outside conflicts, unlike other Christian and Muslim countries."

- Reuters