Maria Shokhtova slapped her face, her cheeks red with embarrassment, after slipping into Yiddish to describe that day 60 years ago when her Ukrainian-Jewish parents brought her, a 10-year-old girl, to this swamp near the Chinese border.
They had come to build the Jewish Autonomous Region, a long-forgotten social experiment that one scholar dubbed a ”grotesque attempt” by Joseph Stalin to create a Jewish homeland on the outermost dregs of Russian soil.
”We were not forced to come here. We came voluntarily,” she said. ”We were very hard working, and the children helped. All were very enthusiastic. It was difficult, but we were happy.”
There wasn`t much happiness in the ensuing decades for the thousands of Jews who settled in this region. Their intellectual and religious leaders were killed and jailed; their Yiddish language and culture were repressed. Even their religious observances were reduced to a few old men meeting
clandestinely in private homes.
Today, however, a revival of Jewish culture is under way. Jews, who account for about 7 percent of the 220,000 people in this 12,400 square-mile- region (bigger than the state of Maryland), are rediscovering their roots.
In September, for the first time in 44 years, a primary school teaching Hebrew and Yiddish will open its doors. Several Jewish women`s groups have started. Jewish children are learning about their history and traditions at a new summer camp.
Efforts are under way to raise money to build a new synagogue and bring a rabbi to the community. And the regional museum has dedicated a wing to the history of Jewish migration to the area, and a history of the Jews`
repression.
”About seven years ago (when Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leader), we decided we must do everything possible to make ourselves Jewish,” said Anna Davidovna Piskovets, administrator of the new National Jewish School.
At the summer camp 70 children were presenting the story of Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt. As they crossed the paved lot that was the Red Sea, the counselors raised water hoses to allow relatively dry passage. But when Pharoah and his men ventured onto the pavement, the hoses came down.
Maria Shokhtova, who will teach Yiddish at the new grammar school, lifted her voice in a Yiddish song from her childhood,
”Come and sing. Come and dance. It`s time to play, my children.”
Birobidzhan`s history is in microcosm a history of the Jews` travail during the Soviet Union`s nightmare years. The scheme for a Jewish Autonomous Region was hatched in the late 1920s when the forced collectivization of agriculture resulted in famine in Ukraine, Byelorussia and other republics that were home to the Jewish Pale of settlements.
With anti-Semitism on the rise throughout western Russia and Europe, hundreds of thousands of Jews streamed to Moscow and other large cities. Thousands more joined Zionist organizations and dreamed of a homeland of their own.
Stalin and his advisers seized upon those aspirations. Fearing Japanese encroachment on the Soviet Union`s far eastern borders, the Kremlin offered to help Jews build their own workers` paradise in a virtually uninhabited region more than 5,000 miles from Moscow on the north bank of the Amur River along the border with China.
The area was a mosquito-infested swamp, surrounded on three sides by Manchuria and on the fourth by impassable mountains. The Great Trans-Siberian Railroad made one stop in the region, at the tiny, now abandoned village of Tikhonkaya, which means quiet.
More than 40,000 Jews, mostly from Ukraine and Byelorussia but joined by 100 Communists from as far away as Argentina and the United States, made the trek between 1928 and 1937. About a third of them stayed.
The early pioneers included teachers, intellectuals, tailors, peddlers and ox-cart drivers. They drained the swamp, built a city, started a kibbutz
(collective farm) and a number of small factories.
Writers and poets created a thriving Yiddish culture. There was a daily newspaper and a Yiddish theater that presented the works of Sholom Aleichem and other Russian Yiddish playwrights.
But Stalin soon put an end to that. His purges of the late 1930s, aimed in part at wiping out his rivals among the old Bolsheviks, many of whom were Jews, took a heavy toll in Birobidzhan.
Luba Wasserman, a leading Jewish poet, and her husband, the director of the Yiddish theater, were imprisoned for over a decade. So was Buzy Miller, editor of the daily Birobidzhaner Shtern newspaper.
According to Vladimir Belinker, Shtern`s current editor, every foreigner who immigrated to Birobidzhan in the 1930s save one perished in Stalin`s labor camps.
”As they say, they were quietly taken by the competent bodies at night,” said the 38-year-old editor whose parents were among the early settlers.
Maria Shokhtova`s own career aspirations were thwarted by Stalin`s repressive policies. She graduated from the local teachers` college in 1945 and got a job teaching Yiddish in the Jewish high school.
But in November 1948, Stalin shut down all Jewish institutions in the region, including the schools, the synagogue and the theater. In 1949, the Museum of Jewish Culture and History was burned to the ground.
During the long years of Cold War, the Jewish Autonomous Region became something of an embarrassment to the Soviet Union and its official anti-Zionism. The Kremlin urged ethnic Ukrainians, army veterans of the Far Eastern campaign and others to move to the area.
It wasn`t until Gorbachev ushered in glasnost that Jewish organizations began to form again in Birobidzhan.
The organizations successfully lobbied the local college to offer Yiddish courses. The state-run Museum of Regional Studies set up the Jewish Hall. At the hall`s center is a Star of David made from a triangle of barbed wire, symbolizing oppression, and a triangle of blue cloth, symbolizing hope.
The Russian branch of the World Jewish Congress last year voted to make Birobidzhan a cultural center for Russian Jewry.
During the 1989 debates over amending the Soviet constitution, there even was talk in Birobidzhan of breaking away from Russia and forming an autonomous Jewish republic.
”It was opposed by democrats (Russian President Boris Yeltsin`s supporters who oppose any division of the Russian federation) and the Cossacks,” said Belinker.
During the early part of the 20th Century, the Cossaks, ancient defenders of Russia known for their military prowess, conducted vicious pogroms against Jews. After the revolution, the last remnants of their autonomy disappeared. Recently Cossaks have been forming new organizations they claim are non-political.
”The Cossacks were afraid that if this became a republic, it would mean this place is only for Jews,” Belinker said. ”There would be a president and ministers, and they were afraid the Jews would get all the high-ranking posts and make their lives better than the other people here.”
The Cossack organization in Birobidzhan has about 100 members, he said, and sees itself as a bulwark against border incursions. Members wear traditional costumes and long swords and draw on Cossack traditions to instill pride and discipline in Russian youths.
Still, Belinker insists there are no tensions in Birobidzhan between Jews and Cossacks, or for that matter, with the large community of ethnic Koreans that settled there after escaping Japanese labor camps in Manchuria.
”Jews and non-Jews have lived here for 60 years in peace,” he said.
”If there is cold, everyone is cold. If there is hunger, everyone is hungry.”
Indeed, caught in the economic disaster that is dragging down Russia, all of Birobidzhan`s residents hope its Jewish connection will help attract foreign capital. The state tractor works, the region`s major employer, hasn`t sold a combine all year.
So far, a American Jew from Oregon-Beaverton has a sister-city relationship with Birobidzhan-is building a sausage plant. An Israeli businessman is refurbishing the city`s cement plant.
The revival of Jewish culture has had an unexpected side effect. In the last two years, some 3,700 Jews have emigrated from Birobidzhan to Israel.
Representatives of the Israeli government make regular treks to the city to encourage emigration. Beitar, a branch of the Zionist youth organization, is actively recruiting among the city`s youths.
”They`ve really split the community,” said Lori Padzonsky, an American free-lance photojournalist working at the Shtern while documenting life in Birobidzhan.
”Israel will not send a rabbi. It will not help to build a synagogue. They come in here and say, `If you don`t live in Israel, you`re not a Jew.` ” ”Perhaps they don`t want to see another competitor,” smiled Belinker, whose own parents emigrated. He has visited them twice but says he intends to stay in Birobidzhan.
”I can understand people`s need to visit their ancient motherland. But people here were brought up in this culture. American Jews are not living for Israel, but nevertheless they are Jews,” he said. ”Why not create Judaism here?”
