http://www.fjc.ru/news/newsArticle.asp?AID=212077
Birobidzhan, population 80,000, is the capital of Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region, proclaimed in 1928 by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin as a national homeland for the Jewish people. It is 8,000 kilometers east of Moscow, the heart of the Russian Far East, eight time zones from the former Pale of Settlement - a city where Yiddish is a living language, yet less than five percent of the population is Jewish.
THIS STRANGE history began 76 years ago, when Stalin proposed an inhospitable 36,000-sq.km. parcel of land in the Russian Far East as the homeland for all right-thinking, internationalist-minded Jews. Meant to be "national in form and socialist in content," the Jewish Autonomous Region of the USSR was part of the Soviet dictator's program of settling ethnic minorities within specific, easily controlled territories.
The JAR's location along the Chinese border also served a defensive purpose, but the regime's main goal was to divert Soviet Jews from Palestine. Early Soviet propaganda efforts used many of the same themes employed by Zionist organizations, with posters showing muscular Jewish pioneers engaged in working the land, casting off their ghetto past to create healthy new lives on collective farms.
That's where the similarities ended. The first Jewish arrivals stepped off the train in the Far East to find a heavily forested, swampy taiga, with no shelter from the humid, mosquito-infested summer heat, or from bitter winters.
More than half the 40,000 Jews who moved there in the first years, including 1,130 foreign Jews who arrived between 1931-32, left almost immediately. Even the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which early on sent some tractors and other farm equipment, by 1936 no longer wished to collaborate in what was increasingly seen in the West as Stalin's misguided and politically motivated experiment.
"In Israel, they don't consider this region to be Jewish, but after all it was the first Jewish administration in the world," declares Kosvintsava. "And even if people ignore our region, it's part of the Jewish world. One local historian said that even if one day there are no Jews in the Jewish Autonomous Region, it will remain a part of Jewish history."
