By Ali Gharib

There has never been a Bukharian in elected office in New York City. Earlier this year, Albert Cohen tried to rectify that.

With tens of thousands of Bukharian immigrants living in the central Queens neighborhoods of Rego Park, Forest Hills and Kew Gardens, Cohen decided it was time to put Bukharians on the political map with his run for the open council seat in District 29.

“I spoke with the leaders of my community,” said Cohen, reflecting on his campaign at T Bone Diner in Forest Hills. “I said, ‘In order to make our mark here, we need to run.’”

Cohen, a local lawyer, sees openings and takes them. Despite his rivals’ status as professional politicians and long campaigns – most had declared their candidacies a year before the Sept. 15 Democratic primary – Cohen bet that with five candidates in the race, none would get enough to support to win outright.

“I saw a very good opportunity,” he said with a mild Russian accent. So he jumped into the campaign just three months before the election.

Taking a leap like that is nothing new for Cohen, who first arrived in Queens at age 15 in 1988 when his family emigrated from Dushanbe, the capitol of Tajikistan.

Bukharians from the former-Soviet ‘Stans’ of Central Asia – Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgystan – had been the world’s most isolated Jewish group. Jewish life was repressed in under the Kremlin’s heavy boot. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Bukharians fled in droves.

The Cohens’ move came in an early wave of immigration that brought some 50,000 Bukharians to New York City.

The family initially settled in Forest Hills. His father, however, struggled to break into New York’s diamond trade and, in 1991, the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, to pursue the industry there.

Cohen cites that kind of willingness to make bold moves in order to succeed as a factor behind his decision to run for office. “I have an entrepreneurial streak,” he said, pointing to the drive and self-employment of his father and both grandfathers, who were merchants.

Eventually, Cohen struck out on his own, too. Cohen attended Pace Law School in White Plains, New York, after his family returned to New York, and landed a job at a big Manhattan law firm. But he didn’t think he was getting the right opportunities to succeed, so he took another gamble and opened up his own general practice handling everything from divorce to real estate in 2003 in Rego Park.

When this year’s campaign season rolled around, Cohen watched the City Council race carefully. Of the five candidates in the race for the 29th District, four were American Jews, which he hoped could split that demographic’s political voice in the 29th district.

As the race kicked into high gear, Bukharians encountered a political issue of their own – zoning laws proposed in March and passed in June that regulated front lawn size and building heights in the Cord Meyer section of Forest Hills.

The move was widely seen by Bukharains as an affront – they were the ones accused of paving over lots and building large houses, known as McMansions, in a neighborhood of quaint Tudor houses.

Cohen says the zoning change wasn’t behind his run for office, although he labeled the new rules “discrimination.”

“Honestly, I don’t live there. I live in Kew Gardens,” he said, slurping up buttered spaghetti at the T Bone Diner. “No one approached me and said, ‘Why don’t you run? We have this issue.’”

Nonetheless, as the only Bukharian candidate in the race, he was also the only candidate to rail against the new zoning regulations in primary debates.

And he acknowledges that mobilizing the robust Bukharian presence in the district could be his ticket to taking advantage of the crowded field.

“Who is my base?” he says. “Bukharians.” When stumping in Russian at a Bukharian theater event in mid-September, he referred to his run as “our candidacy.”

The result was a dizzying grassroots campaign among Bukharians, 95 percent of whom Cohen says were not registered to vote.

By primary day, his campaign headquarters in his office on 108th street was bustling with Russian-speakers making phone calls and shuffling walk-in voters to their polling sites.

Cohen, however, still wasn’t the slickest politician, and his nervousness was on display when he traveled to the edge of Kew Gardens to receive the endorsement of a Sikh newspaper, Shree-e-Panjab. Cohen shuffled on stage as men with full, long beards and colorful turbans gave speeches in Hindi before calling him up.

He seemed less at ease with them than he is among his own people. He did, however, clearly prepare. He touched on a Sikh issue in his speech – the right of Sikh boys to wear turbans to school – and peppered his campaign manager, Lilianna Zulunova, with questions on his way to the event.

“What kind of food do they have?” he asked from the driver’s seat of his SUV.

“Spicy,” Zulunova replied.

But all Cohen’s efforts were not good enough. He lost by 987 votes, out of 7,423 cast, to Karen Koslowitz, a former Council member termed out of office in 2001. Cohen promises that Bukharians are not done in politics. He doesn’t know if he’ll run again, but he promises to lead the community in political engagement.

“Of course, I will be interested and following what happens in the political world,” says Cohen. “I want to see what Karen Koslowitz does for my community and for immigrants.”

“If she serves us well,” he says, “maybe I’m not gonna run.”

And Bukharians appear ready to be led by him. Cohen reached out to John Liu to campaign for his comptroller runoff in Bukharian synagogues. When one congregant, Meyer Aranbayev, 24, a hair stylist, was asked if he would vote for Liu, he deferred to Cohen.

“I need to speak to Albert about it,” he said.