Notes from Birobidzhan

BIROBIDZHAN, Russia – In the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region of Russia, a procession took place, involving a large group of youth – mainly students from the Yiddish language department at the local Social Sciences and Humanities Academy and those persons admiring the talent of the classic Jewish writer Sholom Aleichem. The occasion for this gathering is the celebration of the 150-year anniversary of the writer’s birthday.

The procession began beside Birobidzhan’s large monument to the writer, after which it passed through the city’s main street, which was named for the author in 1934. Eventually, participants found their way to the Regional Scientific Library, also named for Sholom Aleichem, where the parade finished.

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And for those of you who do not know the history or location of Birobidzhan, I include the following video and article which together give a sense of the history and background of the Jewish Autonomous Region.







2008 marks eighty years since the founding of The Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan in the Soviet far east near Mongolia. It was intended to provide the Jews of the USSR equality with all of the other Soviet nationalities by providing them with a homeland as well. Because of its distant location and the necessity of building it from scratch,it never caught on as a national homeland. Periodic purges of its population and its Yiddish library also curtailed the growth of Jewish culture in Birobidzhan. Today, although Yiddish is taught in its schools and enjoys official use, Jews amount to about 5% of its population of 220,000.
Two reasons are additionally cited as reasons for the failure of the Jewish Autonomous Region. The first obstacle was the J.A.R. founders' implacable opposition to Israel as a Jewish homeland. The second difficulty was the militant opposition to Torah of the J.A.R's founding fathers. Throughout Jewish history, groups which separated themselves from Torah as a source of Jewish identity faded from the world scene. Torah and the Land of Israel are a common wellspring of identity for Ashkenazic Sephardic and Mizrachi Jews.
Even within the U.S.S.R., the J.A.R only reached out to Ashkenazim, promoting Yiddish as a Jewish national language. The orthography and vocabulary of Soviet Yiddish were redesigned to minimise the Hebraic components of the officially approved language. The U.S.S.R. had within its borders Bukharian, Georgian, Crimean and other non Ashkenazic strains of Jews with distinctly differing religious customs and languages. A true Soviet Jewish homeland should have recognised these groups in designing a Jewish political entity. Instead, they were ignored in the J.A.R. In retrospect it was probably a blessing in disguise that the Jews of Soviet Asia were ignored in the founding of this ill fated attempt at a Jewish utopia. Had they taken part, they too would have fallen victim to Stalinist paranoia and the accompanying purges. Although Jews in the west should certainly remember the Jews still living in Birobidzhan, its value today is its lessons to this generation.

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