When Jews fled Russia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they scattered all over the globe. Many came to America, helping to found the prominent Ashkenazi community in the country today. Throughout the twentieth century, Jews suffered under the reign of the Soviet Union presidents and are still marginalized in Russia today. Yet, tucked away in the east of Siberia, is there a refuge for these Jewish people?
To be precise, there isn’t exactly a Jewish “homeland” comparable to the land of Israel. There is a town called Birobidzhan, not far from the border of China, a Jewish district. If Stalin and his Soviets were so anti-Jewish as we have come to believe, then why was there a Jewish state in Russia’s territories?
The answer lies in the nature of the community in Birobidzhan. The official site of the region declares it is called the “Jewish Autonomous Region” or the “Jewish Autonomous Oblast.” The autonomy of this region made it nominally out of the control of Russia, though actually under Russia’s authority. But why would Russia have created such a state? One source claims Stalin founded it in 1934 with the idea of a buffer state against the East; with a people like the Jews that he did not mind losing in that state, he could both prevent attacks from an enemy and eliminate an internal threat. The article also states that Stalin wanted to create a Jewish peasantry with Soviet values. If Stalin’s regime rejected traditional religious values that might take away one’s allegiance to the state, then why would he have supported a Jewish state with Soviet overtones? I think that Stalin would have recognized the tightly-knit nature of the Jewish communities and the fact that he could not merely wipe them out. By giving them some concessions, he may have thought he would gain allegiance from an otherwise stubbornly resistant group of people.
Israel is the traditional Jewish homeland, the land from which our ancestors came and founded the Jewish faith. Yet, for the Soviet Jews expelled by the “Communist” dictatorship in the twentieth century, might they not find the JAR more compelling as a home? Ashkenazi Jews might connect more immediately to their last home in Eastern Europe than a Middle Eastern society inhabited by people speaking a language preserved in ancient texts.
With Israel as a holy site in today’s world, where does the JAR fit in? The culture there is more Yiddish in overtones than Hebrew, with Jewish cultural and religious sites. It’s an alternate to the Middle East, perhaps for those who don’t feel comfortable in the sands and sandals of Israel and more at home in the shtetls of old Europe. Though a creation of Stalin in appearance, don’t forget that the community could not exist without the Soviet Jews, few in number though they may have been and may be now, that populate the town. There’s no reason why the JAR should compete with Israel: the two entities are both separate celebrations of the endurance and richness of Jewish heritage. The fact that two communities survive in such different places is a tribute to that. Both are Jewish homelands, that, while they have suffered, are representative of different perspectives of this wonderful tradition.
