Every photograph is an image of the past, but some pasts are more irredeemably lost than others. While a picture of the Empire State Building can be checked against the structure still standing at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, pictures of the World Trade Center can only be checked against memory, or other pictures and documents.

In a century that saw massive emigrations, genocides, and other forms of social dissolution, photography was an important aid to ethnographers in preserving societies about to tumble down the memory hole. “Bukharan Odyssey: Photographs by Zion Ozeri” at the Museum of Jewish Heritage captures the last of the Jewish communities of Central Asia as they fade into history. Of the 120,000 Bukharan Jews in the world, only about 10,000 remain in their traditional home in what is now Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

The entrance to the Rotunda that houses “Bukharan Odyssey” is flanked by eight small color photographs – one of oriental rugs, one of bright fabrics, and six of individuals in vibrant traditional costume. Mr. Ozeri’s black-andwhite pictures are set against this exoticism: As fabled as the cities of the ancient silk route may be, life there has been hard, and was especially hard under the Soviet regime. “Matriarch, Kokand” is a profile of an old, old woman, not so much a picture of a person as a study of wrinkles – the creases and lines in her flesh being the record of a very difficult century.

Mr. Ozeri traveled to Bukhara in the late 1990s to record the Jews there before none were left to photograph. The titles of his pictures help define the ethnographer’s interests: “Musician, Bukhara,””Tailor, Fergana,””StallVendor, Tashkent,” “Mason, Samarkand,” “Knife Sharpener, Bukhara,” “School Nurse, Bukhara,” and “Synagogue Caretaker’s Wife,Tashkent,”suggest he is interested in these people primarily as types and not as individuals. They are stand-ins for all those who held these occupations in the past and were not memorialized. Some of the jobs themselves – knife sharpener, for one – are disappearing, and the competent ethnographer wants at least one of each, to help people in the future and far away understand what was then and there. But, like August Sander in his “Citizens of the Twentieth Century” project, Mr. Ozeri is too good a photographer to keep his work from slipping into art.

Take the synagogue caretaker’s wife. The synagogue caretaker is typically a well-known person because everyone in the community sees him when they come to pray, but his is a very humble job, frequently given as a sort of charity.The caretaker’s wife similarly has little status.The woman in Mr. Ozeri’s picture has been posed sitting on the edge of the dais where the ark holding the Torah scrolls rests.The curtain that covers the ark has a Star of David embroidered on it in gold and a dedication across the bottom in Cyrillic letters. This, and the rough wood planking of the dais, establish the location.

The caretaker’s wife poses obligingly, but seems uncertain why attention to her is being paid. She wears a simple white sweater that buttons down the front, several layers of skirts in patterned materials, and cheap fuzzy slippers. Her left hand rests awkwardly on her knees, and her right hand on a straw broom that she holds as a staff of office. Her hands are those of a woman who does physical work, and the broom – an object of preindustrial manufacture – connects her to women who have cleaned back to the dawn of civilization. This picture has the data the ethnographer requires, but is also a sympathetic and affecting portrait.

The same cannot be said about “Wedding Ceremony, Bukhara.” The walltexts informs us that “The groom’s clothes are unfastened in accord with Bukharan Jewish tradition,” and we see his white short-sleeve shirt is unbuttoned, his belt unbuckled, and his fly unzipped; the picture is interesting because it illustrates this custom. It is also curious that the women hold up their hands with their palms toward the couple, although we need someone to explain why. But the picture has little besides ethnographic information. This is true of “Cradle, Shakhrisyabz,” as well: It is mostly concerned with the elaborate contraption in which a hidden baby is sleeping.

But “Young Bride, Karmana” juxtaposes the woman’s attractive, Eastern looks and ornate robe with the large pots and pans on the floor, and the ladles, strainers, and spatulas hanging on the wall of her kitchen. Her beauty in this setting of simple domesticity draws us in.”Rabbi, Bukhara” is about the particular man, not the profession. It is a tight headshot in which we see the individual hairs of his neatly trimmed white beard and the curls in the fur of his Persian lamb cap. His eyes are set above a dramatic nose and under a deeply furrowed brow, and the eyes have seen a lot. I would like to know what.

Mr. Ozeri was born in Israel to Yemenite parents and studied in New York, where he now lives. Both Israel and New York are immigrant societies that honor and preserve the ethnic backgrounds of their citizens, but Jews are continually amazing themselves that they have inhabited so many lands, acculturated themselves to their hosts, and still remained identifiably Jewish. The Rotunda that houses “Bukharan Odyssey” is surrounded by a gallery with pictures of “World Jewry After 1945” that includes photographs from South Africa, Ethiopia, France, Azerbaijan, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Georgia, Israel, and the U.S.

The past century was too often heedless of minority populations and the odd tribe here or there,or else saw their self-willed absorption into a homogenous modernity. Some, at least, were fortunate to have photographers like Zion Ozeri to create a record – a systematic document – of their way of life before they exited history. It is not fair to judge “Bukharan Odyssey” by the criteria of art photography, but much of the work is too compelling not to.

Until March 12 (36 Battery Place in Battery Park City, 212-437-4491).