For 25 years, Itzhak Yehoshua has been the spiritual face of Bukharian Jewry, fêted by politicians and foreign dignitaries as the Bukharian chief rabbi.
Yehoshua continues to receive greetings and awards from elected officials. But among Bukharians today, in their diaspora capital of Queens in New York City, he is better known as an embarrassment — a great man felled by allegations of lax conversion and kashrut standards, bribery and forgery, and of making false claims in the name of Shlomo Amar, the Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel.
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