The Afterlife of Soviet Zion

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

Will wonders never cease? The attempt to create a viable Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR) in the far east of the Soviet Union between 1928 and the 1950s is now little more than a memory, yet articles and books about it continue to appear.

And now there’s even a musical!

A new piece of theater which premiered in London in late October, Soviet Zion captures this fascinating era of Russian Jewish history.

Written by British lyricist Giles Howe, with music by Katy Lipson, it tells the story of two Jewish families, one American, the other Ukrainian, who move to Birobidzhan, as the JAR was known, in 1939 and participate in the creation of this Yiddish socialist experiment.

But the reality they face is not what they had been led to believe, and for most of them, it ends badly, thanks to Stalin’s purges.

For many years Howe and Lipson had wanted to write a piece that would give them the opportunity to explore their Yiddish heritage, hence this play about an “alternative Zion.”

The cast, appropriately like the settlers themselves, come from all over the world, including Australia, Canada, England, Germany, Hungary, and Russia itself.

I’ve written two books on American and Canadian pro-Soviet groups that supported the Birobidzhan project – Jerusalem on the Amur (2008) for Canada, and Dreams of Nationhood (2010) for the United States – so I’m familiar with the story.

The JAR was founded in 1928, the result of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin=s nationality policy, which stated that each of the national groups that formed the Soviet Union would receive a territory in which to pursue cultural autonomy in a socialist framework.

As the Jewish population grew, so did the impact of Yiddish culture on the region. A Yiddish newspaper, the Birobidzhaner Shtern, was established; a theater troupe was created; and streets in the new capital city were named after prominent Yiddish authors such as Sholem Aleichem and Y. L. Peretz.

The propaganda impact was so effective that several thousand Jews immigrated to Birobidzhan from outside of the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

But with the 1948 establishment of Israel as a Jewish state, the idea of an autonomous Jewish region in the Soviet Union would all be but forgotten.

When the USSR collapsed in 1991, Jews made up just two per cent of the total population of about 190,000. The rest were ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Koreans, Chinese and various indigenous peoples.

But there has been a revival of Jewish life in the post Communist JAR. Yiddish is once again taught in the schools, the Birobidzhaner Shtern is again published, and there is Yiddish radio and television. A new Jewish community centre and synagogue have been built and a new Sholem Aleichem monument recently unveiled.

Today the Jewish population of the JAR is about 5,000, according to Jewish community figures. So though it never became the agrarian, socialist-Jewish utopia that some founders envisioned, Birobidzhan remains in some ways a Jewish place.