Kesher Talk

Jews in odd places: Russia: The Jewish Autonomous Region isn’t predominantly Jewish or truly autonomous. And it hasn’t exactly evolved into the “God’s heaven” that Josef Stalin vowed to create in 1928 on this remote chunk of swampland, about the size of Belgium, along Russia’s border with China in the Far East:

“You can smell the Jewry here, and we want to strengthen it because we consider Birobidzhan the center of Jewish life in the Far East,” he says. “We’re only beginning.”

Designated in 1934 as a “Jewish Autonomous Region,” Birobidzhan had 108,000 residents by 1939, but only 18,000 Jews.

They fled the Pale of Settlement, Western Europe and the Americas to build a Jewish socialist homeland — or, as Stalin saw it, to solve the “Jewish question.”

But the place was forbidding: After a 10-day train ride from Moscow to the basin of the Biro and Bidzhan rivers, travelers found swarming mosquitoes, frigid temperatures and impenetrable swamps. Some 20 percent of them quickly returned home.

Those who remained built their own wooden dwellings and cultivated the land while enjoying a short stint of Jewish culture through the 1930s.

However, a swelling population and an anti-Semitic state policy led the regime to launch purges and repressions for decades to come.

The Jews managed to retain islands of Yiddish culture: The Birobidzhan Stern newspaper and Yiddish radio prevailed as state mouthpieces. But when freedom arrived in the 1990s, many fled to Israel.

In sleepy Birobidzhan, where a mere 5 percent of today’s 88,000 residents are Jewish, the superficial trappings of Jewish life are more common than real Jewish spirit — mainly because regional authorities are cognizant of the federal benefits that the republic’s Jewish identity can attract, observers say.

The remodeled train station is crowned with a sign in Yiddish, and a grand menorah dominates the square below.

All government buildings, including the post office, are marked in Russian and Yiddish, the official second language. The capital’s Jewish mayor, Alexander Vinnikov, whose family arrived from Belarus in 1947, says a dozen locals receive official city documents in Yiddish each month.

Religious spirit is glaringly absent, however. Leaders hope Chabad Rabbi Mordechai Scheiner, who arrived in fall 2002, can fill the new synagogue upon its completion, expected this fall.

Moscow allocated $112,000 to finance the synagogue, the first in Russia to receive federal funds.

posted by William @ 11/06/2003 09:03:11 AM