Neighbors say the designs of Bukharian homes in Queens do not fit in with the smaller houses of the area.

By KIRK SEMPLE

To the Bukharian Jews of Central Asia, a big house is an essential tradition: a place to shelter multiple generations, to hold large parties, to reaffirm a community’s unity.
So wherever they have put down roots, Bukharians have built aggressively, including in central Queens, where tens of thousands have settled since the early 1990s .
There, Bukharians have been tearing down the neighborhood’s sedate Tudor and Cape Cod-style homes, paving over lawns and erecting white-brick edifices that borrow from old Europe, with sweeping balustrades, stone lions bracketing regal double doorways and pitched roofs.
But while the Bukharians’ arrival has been a boon for the area’s residential construction industry, it has been a bane for some neighbors.
“A lot of the houses that are going up there are just simply too big relative to the other houses that are there and have been there for generations. They are out of character,” said Melinda R. Katz, a city councilwoman.
The Bukharians contend that they are being misunderstood.
“We like to utilize every single square inch of land, every inch of territory, explained Rabbi Shlomo Nisanov, head of a Bukharian synagogue and community center in Queens. “For some reason, people don’t appreciate it.
Mr. Nisanov, a blocky man who was born in Uzbekistan and emigrated to Queens when he was a child, took a stroll through his neighborhood and delivered something of a short course in Bukharian immigrant culture.
He showed how in a decade, Bukharians had come to dominate some residential blocks, as relatives bought homes within walking distance of one another and some extended families crowded under one roof.
The Bukharian tendency to pave over everything is practical, he continued. Bukharians preferred a terrace or patio to a lawn, which he called “useless land. A yard required mowing - “a waste of time,” he said.
Rabbi Itzhak Yehoshua, the chief rabbi of the Bukharian Jews in the United States, said he urged modesty among his congregation in order to avoid tensions in the community, but he has met resistance.
“I tell them all the time that our ancestors taught us about being humble, he said. “They say, ‘Rabbi, this is our home for entertainment, it’s our fortress. Now we work’ - and they work very hard - ‘and this is our understanding of America.’
He went on: “I am very happy and proud that my congregation interprets freedom to be successful and to work honestly and to settle and to help the community. And each house is another stone to help create the Jewish community.
Cynthia Zalisky, executive director of the Queens Jewish Community Council, worries about tension between the Bukharian and non-Bukharian communities. “It’s a very delicate situation.
We’re trying to see whether there’s some compromise here,” she said. “We got to put our heads together like the United Nations.”