Russia's Jewish Autonomus Region Celebrates 90th Anniversary

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

On March 28, 1928, nine decades ago, the Soviet Union approved the choice of Birobidzhan, a sparsely populated area of 36,490 square kilometres in the Soviet far east, as a “national Jewish entity.”

On the border with China, it was seven time zones east of Moscow and a six-day journey away on the Trans-Siberian railway.

By May 1928 the first groups of Jewish settlers from cities and villages in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine arrived in the region. By 1932 25,000 Jews were living there. 

To encourage further settlement, in 1934 Birobidzhan was elevated to a Jewish Autonomous Oblast (Region), where Jews could pursue cultural autonomy in a “socialist framework.” As a Communist entity, religious Judaism was frowned upon. 

The capital city was also called Birobidzhan, and Yiddish was the official language. A Yiddish newspaper, the Birobidzhaner Shtern, was launched, and a Yiddish theater founded. 

The work of the police department, courts and city administration was carried out at least partially in Yiddish.

By 1939, almost 18,000 Jews lived in the region – some 16 per cent of the overall population.

This “Red Zion” was established partly as a Soviet alternative to the Zionist project in British-ruled Palestine. 

Another reason was an attempt to try to attract overseas Jewish financial support and investment. Some settlers came from places like Argentina, Canada, the United States, and even Mandatory Palestine itself.

This Russian rival to Zionism was short-lived, though. The region was shaken by Soviet leader JosephStalin’s purges in the late 1930s. Much of the local party leadership was executed and expressions of Jewishness were discouraged.

The region enjoyed another influx of Jews following the Second World War. These were people ho had escaped the Holocaust in the Europeanp o the USSR and had no homes to which to return. 

The local Jewish population peaked at some 50,000, but Birobidzhan was again hit by growing Soviet anti-Semitism in the late 1940s. The new purges were followed by decades of neglect.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, most remaining Jews left Birobidzhan, the majority for Israel.

Today the population of the area, still officially called the Jewish Autonomous Region, is barely one per cent Jewish, but the authorities cultivate the memory of Jewish customs and history and even hope to attract new Jewish migrants.

If the local government gets its way, more Jews would move to the region. Birobidzhan’s proximity to China could provide advantages for businesses wanting to penetrate the Chinese market.

The region has an extensive border with northern China along the Amur River – about 600 kilometres. The first railway bridge across the river, linking the two countries, is being built and trade with China is what makes the local economy function.

I have published two books on the Canadian and American activists who supported the Jewish Autonomous Region from the 1920s through the early 1950s and so know quite a bit about the region.

In a way my research has come full circle. I recently sent my extensive microfiche collection, comprising about 400 microfiche transparencies, which I used when writing my books, to Nikolai Borodulin in New York, who works on Soviet Jewish issues. 

He is Russian-born, and now works n the United States, and he has sent off the collection, plus other materials , to the state library in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. 

They will copy these and therefore have a complete set of the complete run of the three Yiddish-language pro-Birobidzhan magazines, published from 1924 to 1951, in the collection.

Stalin had destroyed most of the library’s holdings after 1948, when the second wave of anti-Semitic repression enveloped the region.  It’s nice to think they’ll be back “home.”