In Samarkand on a recent Saturday morning, Sabbath services were held at the 120-year-old Gumbaz Shul, one of two remaining synagogues in a city that once had 50. Leading the prayers was a fleshy electrician named Boris Muratov, speaking in a mixture of Bukharan and halting Hebrew. About 15 men, most of them over 50, take part. Women sit in an adjoining room, listening to the service through a thin wood wall. Muratov took over as leader of the congregation when the previous rabbi left. Soon he, too, plans to depart for Israel. Who will take his place? "Nobody," he says, shaking his head. "There are no other rabbis."

Samarkand is not an isolated case. All over Central Asia, Jews continue to emigrate in large numbers. According to community leaders and researchers, up to 200,000 Bukharans, as they are called, lived in the region 10 years ago. Now a few thousand, at most, are left. (Because many Jews hid their identity to avoid discrimination, population estimates are imprecise, and hotly debated.)

Along the narrow, crooked streets of Samarkand's Ivritski Mahalla – the Jewish Quarter - the signs are everywhere: House For Sale, Desperate To Sell Now. Sometimes the words are taped to a piece of cardboard and placed in a window; sometimes they are painted directly on the wall. The going rate for an average home is around $2,000. In 1990, between 20,000 and 50,000 Jews lived in Samarkand, the second-largest city in Uzbekistan. Today, just a few hundred remain. Almost all of them are planning to emigrate, following family and friends to Israel and the United States.

"After five years there will be no Jews in Samarkand," says Yuri Yusupov, a retired veterinarian who has lived his whole life in this city, which served as the capital of the 14th Century Mongol conqueror Timur. His brother and children have moved to Queens, New York; Yusupov says he will probably join them soon.

There is a certain irony to the timing of this exodus. After 70 years of Soviet rule, Central Asia's Jews can finally practice their religion without interference. Instead, they are leaving. Some want a more prosperous life. Others are concerned about the spread of Islamic extremism. And since the end of the Soviet Union, the region, which was heavily subsidized by Moscow, has fallen on hard times.

Yusupov and his wife, Clara, are selling old extension cords and the last of his veterinary implements at a street bazaar in the Jewish Quarter, which is now inhabited mostly by Tajiks and Roma. At their house, a small, airy place that looks out over a cluttered courtyard where Yuri grows grapes, they serve a lunch of kosher beef (once a week, an out-of-town rabbi arrives to supervise the slaughter of three cows, enough to supply the community), and talk about their life.

Clara was born in this house; her father built it himself more than 90 years ago. "We had a very beautiful life," she says. "Weddings, we used to celebrate for the whole day. Those are beautiful memories. Once, the streets were full of Jews."

No one knows when Jews first arrived in Central Asia. Many scholars believe they fled to the region 2,500 years ago when the Babylonians conquered Israel. The name stems from Bukhara, another Uzbek city that was once a center of Central Asian Jewish life. They speak a distinct language, a dialect of Tajik known as Judeo-Tajik, and traditionally worked as skilled tradesmen, mostly as weavers and cloth-dyers.

Over the centuries, they have developed customs and rituals that differ from those of Jews in Europe, the Mediterranean, and Persia. "A lot of times, people assume they're Sephardic," says Dartmouth professor Theodore Levin, an ethnomusicologist who has studied Bukharan music. "But they're not at all Sephardic. They comprise a separate cultural group of Jews."

This culture revolves around family: extended groups living together in compounds built around a common courtyard. Many Bukharan rituals contain elements borrowed from Uzbek culture. Some religious songs, for example, use the same melodies as Uzbek Muslim songs.

The emigration is fueled in part by economic despair. Since Uzbekistan gained independence in 1991, the country's economy has remained stagnant, with the average monthly salary at around $60. Many Jews also feel threatened by the rise radical Islam, as espoused by Afghanistan's Taliban. Armed incursions during the past two summers -- staged by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which reportedly has training and supply bases in northern Afghanistan – have heightened concerns.

Over the past 10 years, an estimated 50,000 Bukharan Jews have resettled in New York City alone. Some experts suggest that the emigration process has reached a stage that will be difficult, if not impossible to arrest, calling into question the ongoing viability of Uzbekistan's Jewish community. At this point, most Jews feel they have no choice. With so few left, even those who want to stay feel they must leave: there is no longer a community for them, or their children. "People are really being torn apart," says Alanna Cooper, an anthropologist who has done extensive fieldwork on Bukharans in Uzbekistan, the US, and Israel. "They know that they have to leave because they have no future there. But they really feel attached to it. It was their home."

Once they leave Central Asia, many Bukharan Jews have trouble adjusting to their new surroundings. "Their communities and families have been splintered in the process of immigration," says Cooper. "They're trying to figure out how they fit into these new places. The values and expectations are really different in the West than in Uzbekistan."

In the face of these pressures, the traditional culture frays. "With TV and movies, assimilation here comes very quickly," says Aron Aronov, who departed a decade ago for New York, in large part because his parents and siblings had already emigrated. "I had to join my family," he says. "Birds of a feather flock together."

A short, stocky man with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair, Aronov is a former linguistics professor who now works for a Jewish social service agency. He has started a Bukharan Jewish museum in his Queens rowhouse. His basement is crammed with historical objects, among them a 450-year-old torah made from deerskin, antique silk robes, water urns, a wooden abacus, and

thousands of photos and documents. Aronov continues to add to his collection, and dreams of moving the museum to a larger, more public space. He feels the clock ticking. "Two thousand years of history - finished," he says wearily. "We close this chapter."