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May 7: Birobidzhan

Lawrence Bush
May 6, 2010

12902792On this date in 1934, the establishment of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast of Birobidzhan was approved by the Soviet Presidium, in reflection of Stalin’s nationality policy at the time, which viewed Jews as a national minority entitled to pursue a secular, Yiddish cultural heritage. The region is in the far eastern, southern region of Siberia, just north of Manchuria. The project was, in part, a Soviet response to Zionism, and, in part, an effort to build a socialist, agricultural Jewish counterculture to traditional Jewish religious life and economics. Few Jews responded to the call to emigrate to Birobidzhan, however, despite the instituting of Yiddish as a language of education and public life, the establishment of a Yiddish magazine and theater troupe, the naming of streets for Sholem Aleichem, Y.L. Peretz and other Jewish cultural heroes, and more. Within two years of its official founding, the project was all but shut down as Stalin began his purges; within five years, as the Holocaust got underway, only 18,000 Jews lived in Birobidzhan, constituting 16 percent of the local population (today the figure is about 3,000, out of a population of about 200,000). The numbers ticked up to 30,000 after the Holocaust — but then came Stalin’s harsh repression of Jewish cultural and political leaders in the late 1940s, which resulted in a hard death for Soviet Jewish autonomy.

“Birobidzhan has become an important Jewish cultural center in the far east of Russia, although only a few thousand Jews remain there. . . . At the state-supported Jewish day school, over a thousand students . . . study Yiddish and Hebrew, Jewish history and literature, Jewish dance and Jewish cuisine — yet more than 80 percent are non-Jews.” —Nikolai Borodulin

​​​​Lawrence Bush edited Jewish Currents from 2003 until 2018. He is the author of Bessie: A Novel of Love and Revolution and Waiting for God: The Spiritual Explorations of a Reluctant Atheist, among other books. His new volume of illustrated Torah commentaries, American Torah Toons 2, is scheduled for publication this year.