HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------- In a controverial social experiment, a Jewish social experiment, a jewish autonomous state was set up in Siberia in 1928. Despite the terrors of Stalin and Hitler, John O'Mahony finds it still intact, a frozen mini-Zion John
O'Mahony It is Sabbath in Birobidzhan,
capital of the Jewish autonomous region. A huge illuminated menorah candelabra,
its stems fashioned from rough metal pylons, its seven flames gracelessly
represented by crude bare lamps, calls the Jewish congregation to service
through the bitter winter morning. The huddled figures that come tramping
through the snow are mostly elderly, all of them swaddled in hefty coats,
brightly coloured scarves and fluffy fur hats. Temperatures are already swooping
down towards -10 C, and within a few days will reach a ferocious -30 C. This is
one consideration that Stalin neglected to take into account when he marked out
this desolate corner of Siberia's frozen far east as the Soviet homeland for the
Jews: Zion was never meant to be this cold.
The synagogue itself, pinned between grey apartment blocks on the city's
outskirts, might be mistaken for a simple wooden shack but for the menorah and
the blue stars of David adorning its walls. Inside, it is so cramped that the
sexes must be segregated by a grubby curtain that cuts the women off from view.
The reading today, appropriately, is Jacob's dream at Bethel, in which God
promises a land that will belong to him and his descendants. At the end, Oleg
Shavulski, the region's only rabbi, asks the congregation: "Who understood that?
Can anyone sum it up in a couple of words?" There is a mumbling of female voices
from behind the curtain: "The Jews were supposed to be killed but they were
saved," bleats one woman. The rabbi patiently acknowledges this as one
interpretation, but goes on to emphasise themes of spirit and endurance.
However, the voice behind the curtain cuts him off, growing ever more
strident and insistent: "It's all about spiritual and physical annihilation,"
the unseen woman cries, "Stalin didn't want to convert Birobidzhan into a
homeland for us. He wasn't any better than Hitler. He just wanted to gather all
the Jews together in one place and wipe them out. That is the message of
Birobidzhan..."
Founded in 1928, and given its full legal status in 1934, there can be little
doubt that the Jewish autonomous region - known locally simply as Birobidzhan -
ranks as one of humanity's most unusual, exotic and misguided social
experiments. Mooted in a time of post-revolutionary fervour, when it was
government policy to dole out territories to national minorities, the scheme was
originally planned for the Ukraine, Crimea and Belarus, areas that already had a
large Jewish population.
Why exactly the Soviet authorities eventually chose a remote strip of land on
the Chinese border 8,000km from Moscow is still unclear, though it probably had
something to do with objections from Ukrainian and Crimean residents, securing
the border against the threat of Chinese invasion and the lack of availability
of other options. Some have even put it down to a particularly cruel joke on the
part of Stalin (who, following Lenin, believed that the Jews were "a people
without a future, whose very existence had yet to be proved".) What is certain
is that, thousands of miles from Jewish centres, without historical links of any
kind, the Soviet Zion seemed blighted right from the start.
This didn't stop the Soviet propaganda machine from cranking out countless
posters of smiling Jews toiling the fields under banners that proclaimed: "Build
a socialist Birobidzhan" and "Strengthen the great achievements of the Leninist
nationality policy". An aeroplane called the Birobidzhanets was commandeered to
fly over Belarus and Ukraine dropping leaflets. Novels were written in Yiddish
extolling its virtues and in the mid-30s a propaganda film, Seekers Of
Happiness, depicted the journey of an American family who moved to the Jewish
autonomous region to escape the great Depression.
Birobidzhan was to be a haven where the Jews could escape the squalor of the
Shtetl and toil the land, where Zionist Hebrew would succumb to proletarian
Yiddish, and where the synagogue would be supplanted by Jewish theatre and
music.
However, when the first Jewish settlers arrived in 1928 all they found was a
train station, a few huts and a large marsh. Of the first wave who arrived that
year, almost all left immediately. During the first decade of its existence,
when almost 40,000 Jews were persuaded to relocate to the region, the drop-out
rate was in excess of 50%. Yet despite this, the Jews of Birobidzhan managed to
erect a city almost with their bare hands and drain the surrounding area for
agriculture. Just as they were getting a foothold, however, the region was
struck in 1936-37 by Stalin's great terror, which saw thousands of Birobidzhan
Jews fall victim to the purges and many of its political leaders thrown in jail.
Almost all the Yiddish schools were closed and the Jewish influx into the region
virtually stopped. By the onset of war, Jews in Birobidzhan accounted for just
16% of the overall population. The Soviet Zion experiment had come to an abrupt
halt.
The Birobidzhan project saw a brief revival at the end of the second world
war, when victims of the Holocaust were shipped out east en masse. However,
Stalin's campaign against the Jews (deemed "rootless cosmopolitans") was soon in
full merciless swing, resulting in the closure, in the early 50s, of
Birobidzhan's last Jewish cultural institutions, its Jewish theatre and its
Yiddish newspaper. The Judaica collection of the public library was burned.
Stalin even began exiling Jews to Birobidzhan, some suspect, with a view to mass
exterminations. Any second far eastern holocaust was averted by the dictator's
death, though subsequent Soviet leaders have tried simply to ignore the Jewish
autonomous region as at best a failed experiment, at worst a vicious hoax.
Birobidzhan today bears many of the marks of this curious history. The huge
soviet-style concrete banner perpetually unfurling itself on Birobidzhan city
limits and the sign over the main train station, convey to travellers their
imminent destination in both Russian and Yiddish. Many street signs are also
bilingual: Shalom Aleichem Street, Emmanuel Kazakevich Street, Buzi Miller
Street, all named after Yiddish writers who lived in the region. And Birobidzhan
Shtern, the newspaper which reopened after Stalinism, still publishes a Yiddish
edition.
Thanks to a 10,000-strong post-perestroika surge in emigration to Germany and
Israel, the Jews now make up just 3-4% of the overall population. Yet there are
still many who refuse to leave, harbouring a grudging affection for their
fractured Zion. Among the congregation at the synagogue, it is possible to find
the last survivors of the first wave of settlers who came here brimming with
idealism: "In 1929, I came here from the Ukraine with my parents when I was just
13," says retired factory worker Lyubov Israelovna, now aged 85. "It really was
an empty place, there was nothing at all here. My father had to build our wooden
house. We built the whole city from scratch ourselves. In the Ukraine, we were
surrounded by Jewish culture, Jewish music, but here there was none of that. We
stayed only because of the belief that we could somehow build a better life for
ourselves."
Jews from the second major influx of settlers can be found at the Ghetto
club, a group of survivors who meet in a community centre in downtown
Birobidzhan every month to celebrate Sabbath: "Our camp was in Ukraine, it was a
small Jewish borough about 220 kilometres from Kiev," says Verkhleb Abramovich,
a labourer in his 60s. "There was a sandpit where Nazis were shooting people.
Some were hanged in public. My cousin had her breasts cut off and my brother had
a five-cornered star cut into his skin.
"So, in 1947 when the recruiters came and proposed the journey to
Birobidzhan, we all wanted to go. We were excited about the idea of a Jewish
republic. And, in general, we weren't disappointed. We were given bread and
potatoes, we weren't hungry any more. For the first time, we could live a decent
life."
Another member of the Ghetto club, a former furniture factory worker named
Mikhail Kiselbrener, has an altogether different recollection: "When we were
taken to go to Birobidzhan, they promised us the golden mountains," he
remembers. "They told us that we would have our houses, the land, that we would
be given everything and it would be wonderful there. It was very hard in Ukraine
at the time, especially the first 18 months of starvation after the war." The
reality turned out to be less radiant: "It was the same starvation as in the
Ukraine. We were placed in barracks which were full of holes, you could almost
see right through, and it was winter, -40 C. I remember we were given potatoes
that were frozen the next morning. There was absolutely nothing to eat. People
were dying from hunger even more then in Ukraine."
Those born after the death of Stalin generally avoided such physical
hardships, but faced an entirely different and perhaps more insidious malaise:
total assimilation. "We grew up knowing nothing at all about Jewish traditions,"
says 32-year-old Nina Kaufmann, now the synagogue secretary. "We ate pork, we
even ate salo (Russian salted pork fat). We had no idea that it was forbidden.
"We were brought up in the communist system, and that took priority. We were
pioneers and everyone was paying the usual compliments to Stalin and Lenin. In
my childhood, I didn't even know anything about Israel. Sometimes, my parents
would get a letter from Israel and they would be too scared to open it. They
would simply hide it."
Even the rabbi, prior to his "spiritual awakening" in 1989, claims to have
known little about Jewish traditions: "Even as late as '96, when the rabbi came
from Jerusalem to circumcise the boys, we didn't know what circumcision was. It
was terrifying." It is this complete identity blackout, more than the purges,
the hardships or, more recently, the falling Jewish population, that has led
Rabbi Shavulski, aged 32, to denounce Birobidzhan: "The only thing I could say
is that this Birobidzhan was given to the Jews who were leaving Ukraine and
coming here because they were running from hunger. And the Jews who came saved
themselves physically, not spiritually."
However, even Rabbi Shavulski would agree that since perestroika, there have
been flickers of light. Thanks to a post-communist relaxation, children in the
main primary school once again receive instruction in Jewish traditions. On the
day we visited, the teacher was presiding over a class of 10- and 11-year-olds:
"Today we are going to learn about the celebration of the Hanukkah," the teacher
said. After lighting each candle of the eight-stemmed Hanukkah candelabra, the
class sang Yiddish songs before attempting to explain why they are interested in
Jewish culture: "Because I myself am a Jew," said 10-year-old Maxim. "Because
few people understand the Jewish religion and culture," said Katya, "and
everybody understands the Russian."
Just down the street, a group of young college students are also learning
Yiddish in a tiny room adorned with charts showing the migrations of the Jews
and the Russian equivalents of the Yiddish alphabet. Bizarrely, none of the
pupils is Jewish: "We were given the option of two languages, French and
Yiddish," says 21-year-old Nadya, "I chose Yiddish because it is more
interesting for me than French, and more useful."
The teacher, Elena Belayeva, works for Freid, one of the main Birobidzhan
Jewish organisations. She explains forthrightly: "None of these girls will ever
get the chance to go to France and not many French people come to Birobidzhan.
So, whether Yiddish is a dead language is theoretical for them. Why not learn
it? It is more interesting and more exotic."
Perhaps the most bizarre side-effect of the Jewish/Russian melting pot is the
Taiga Vostok vodka factory, whose sweeping production line rattles out a
selection of four different types of Kosher vodka, all emblazoned with the Star
of David and Jewish caricatures from Fiddler on the Roof: "It is all checked by
the chief rabbi of Moscow, Pinchas Goldschmidt," one technician assures me, "and
the rabbi has the right to come in at any time to inspect and ensure that we are
following the regulations and doing everything correctly. This is a serious
undertaking and it's important that nobody gets cheated. That's why we make sure
that everything is being done according to kosher recipes."
However, scratch the surface and it's difficult to escape the suspicion that
these changes are no more permanent and meaningful than the old propaganda. In
the classroom, most of the children express a desire to emigrate to Israel:
"Because you can swim in the sea and there is no winter," says 10-year-old Yana
Maslova.
Lurking under every cultural aspect of the Jewish autonomous region is the
same insidious confusion. "Jewish identity here is a complicated thing,"
continues Beleyeva, who has studied in Israel and works also for one of the main
Birobidzhan cultural institutions, "You cannot define it as you can in Israel.
Are you religious? Secular? Do you or don't you believe? The very fact of being
in a place called this Jewish autonomous region challenges everything
immediately."
But some commentators prefer not to see the whole idea as doomed from the
beginning: "I don't think that it necessarily was, right from the start," says
Robert Weinberg, author of Birobidzhan, Stalin's Forgotten Zion (University of
California Press): "I think that certain policies and decisions made it very
difficult. What kind of Jewish culture can you have if you cannot talk about
Jewish history and Judaism, if the whole breath of Jewish history - everything -
has got to be strait-jacketed to work for the building of socialism. I wouldn't
say that it was doomed from the start but it had everything stacked against it."
Weinberg also feels that the experiment ultimately wasn't a total failure,
that it raised interesting issues about the nature of being Jewish: "There are
many Zionists who say that you can't have a Jewish homeland unless it is in
Palestine. But you can certainly think of Jewish civilisation outside of
Palestine and there are plenty of Jewish thinkers who argue that you can have a
Jewish nation outside of a specific territory in Palestine. It certainly didn't
help that there was no infrastructure there of Jewish culture, that it all had
to be imported wholesale. Can you have a Jewish nation without Judaism - can it
be entirely secular? That is a very tough question." For the moment, however, it
would seem to be one that the Jewish autonomous region has answered in the
negative.
But for those Jews who remain there, the thought of Birobidzhan as a
sociological experiment is particularly galling: "I hate it when people talk
about the Birobidzhan 'project', as if it was a huge laboratory," says Rabbi
Shavulski. "It's easy to forget that we are talking about people."
Ultimately, it will be left to people like Shavulski to care for the victims
of this piece of social engineering gone awry. Despite the downward trends, in
everything from population to social conditions, the rabbi remains stubbornly
optimistic: "The future depends on God and on us," he says, lighting up the
bulbs on the Menorah once more to see us along our way. "At Hanukkah last week
we had more than 70 people here in the synagogue. My position is that if people
emigrate, then it is a good outcome. If they go to Israel, then they will
probably be happy there. But if people decide to stay, that is equally good. As
long as there are two people left, I will stay and do my duty. If only one
remains, I'll stay on for that one. Who cares whether or not this is the Jewish
autonomous region? My job is to stay here and serve the Jews."
==^================================================================ This email was sent to: [email protected] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9WB2D Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================ |
Title: Guardian | Russia's lost tribe
