Jewish Post, Indianapolis, Marion County, 7 September 1994 — Page 2

IND 2 September 7,1994

Immigrant embodies HIAS’s good work

By ED STATTMANN BLOOMINGTON — Aieksander Naymark, 34, has been awarded one of 49 $1,000 scholarships given to young Jewish immigrants across America. The awards are from HIAS the Hebrew immigrant Aid Society, which has been helping Jewish immigrants to America since 1880. Naymark's HIAS award was presented at the Jewish Community Center in Indianapolis, where the Federation's immigrant resettlement pro-

gram is based. Naymark was bom in in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, but went to Moscow at age 6 with his family. Nevertheless, it was in Uzbekistan that he gained professional status as an archaeologist, an expert on the Sogdians, who dominated a portion of the famed Silk Road in the centuries around the beginning of the current millennium and whose capital was the fabled city of Samarkand. "I had a good career in the

Soviet Union because I was a graduate of Moscow University, the best school in the country," Naymark says. But he said he got in trouble with the KGB — secret police — because "I was talking too much, I guess," and because he had a lot of friends outside the country, as is natural for an archaeologist. The KGB harassment deprived him of work for a year, he says. But that was not the pri-

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mary reason he left his native land. He was the curator of the Central Asian collection and head of Central Asian expeditions and a senior researcher. Naymark was employed from 1983 to 1991 by the Museum of Oriental Art and put together large expeditions that were working in Central Asia. He says he had eight permanent staff and about 70 other people working. "I published about 30 scholarly papers, mostly preliminary, because the expeditions took all my time. I was working like crazy. "But in the late '80s, there were several processes which prevented normal development there." Perestroika, the easing of the repression, came and many things became available that had previously been banned. At the same time, though, nationalist movements began growing and bringing with them disputes between nationalities and between regional peoples and Russians that made it hard to work in Central Asia. "The first thing that suffered was archaeology. It had been used as an instrument of political propaganda in Russia," to manufacture legitimacy for the regime in power, Naymark said. Peoples of Turkic, Iranian

Hear Holy Day services at home

The Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation is pleased to announce that High Holy Day worship services will be broadcast over radio again this year. WICR (88.7 FM) has graciously agreed to provide th is service for persons unable to attend worship. The schedule of broadcasts is as follows: Rosh Hashanah evening: Monday, Sept. 5,6:30 p.m. Rosh Hashanah morning: Tuesday, Sept. 6,8:30 a.m. Yom Kippur evening: Wednesday, Sept. 14, 6:30 p.m. Yom Kippur morning: Thursday, Sept. 15,8:30 a.m.

and Russian descent were at odds. Besides, that, he says, "I was trying to participate in Jewish life." His great-grand-father was a shochet — a ritual butcher. And his grandfather in the late 1920s acted as a rabbi, running an unofficial synagogue despite the efforts of the communists to stamp out religion. "I wasn't very religious but, for example, I made the first Israeli exhibition of coins in 25 years in 1990." The exhibition was in place for four months, he said. "I also participated in the Jewish Historical Society." His father, a poet and translator, by luck, escaped a scene of anti-Semitic violence perpetrated by the nationalist group Pamyat against the Writers' Union. "My father, happily, left the place 10 minutes before it started." "He also got some threatening calls during the night from these nice guys," Naymark says. He says the main reason he left was fear of a coup and possibly civil war. "I thought the coup (of 1991) would be successful. 1 didn't expect these drunkards Continued on page 6

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