Posted on 10/10/2004 5:35:40 AM PDT by gobucks
Visiting Birobidzhan is like slipping with Alice through the looking glass.
The streets are clean, the people are smiling, prosperity is in the air, yet everything is topsy-turvy.
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. Cultural confusion is everywhere. A 15-meter high electric menora stands guard over the central train station, where a huge sign proclaims "Birobidzhan" in both Russian and Yiddish. The province's only hotel, which still conducts business in Soviet-era bureacratese, is on Sholem Aleichem Street.
A new synagogue and Jewish community center light up the night sky with enormous green and blue neon Stars of David. The local Birobidzhaner Stern publishes a weekly Yiddish section, Yiddish and Jewish culture are taught in the public schools, and government documents are printed in Russian and Yiddish.
At last month's 70th anniversary celebration of the region's official designation as an oblast, public stages were set up throughout the downtown area. Russian folk troupes alternated with Anatevka-style dancing by children in faux hassidic garb, followed by Israeli circle dances performed to the music of Naomi Shemer and Ofra Haza.
Back and forth they swirled – Russian, Yiddish, Israeli – all day long. Yet virtually none of the boys sporting tzitzit (ritual fringes) and peyot (sidecurls), the girls singing Am Yisrael Hai, or the adults noshing on blintzes and herring at the nearby L'Chaim Restaurant were Jewish. And no one thought it strange when the non-Jewish governor donned a kippa to dedicate the city's new synagogue – the first synagogue in post-Soviet Russia to be built partly with federal funds – and announced that if the rabbi "needs a 10th for the minyan," he was ready to step in.
But then, that would hardly be necessary – half the city council is Jewish.
It's all quite surreal. But while Birobidzhan's odd Yiddish-Russian amalgamation should not be misinterpreted as signaling a real revival of Judaism in the Jewish Autonomous Region, it does go beyond nostalgia or kitsch to touch upon serious questions of cultural and religious identity.
What does it mean when Yiddish is no longer the language of Jews alone, but the national tongue of a non-Jewish community? When non-Jews tell Jewish jokes, and everyone laughs? When people of Cossack and Russian blood are proud of living in the "Jewish" Autonomous Region, where they search for their roots in the stories of Sholem Aleichem, where they feel a strong kinship with Israel, yet do not practice Judaism nor have any wish to do so?
Can Yiddish and Jewish culture survive where Jews and Judaism do not?
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 that could drop to -40 Fahrenheit. Fewer than 900 indigenous people, mostly traveling hunters, lived in the entire territory. The hapless new immigrants lived in tents, cutting down trees and draining the swamps by hand like the first kibbutzniks, but without the latter's sense of historic purpose to sustain them.
Zyama Geffen was six years old in 1928 when his father and three uncles set out from the Russian republic of Kazan for the JAR to break ground for the rest of the family.
"It was just swamps, and impassable forests," says Geffen, who at 83 still lives in the collective farm of Waldheim his father helped build. "You can imagine how hard it was to cut your way through those trees by hand. There were no roads, and that first year the hay crop flooded, so there was no food for the horses."
Geffen smiles at the suggestion that his parents and their comrades were motivated by the dream of building a Jewish homeland. "We didn't even think about that. The main thing was to work the land." Ten years after Geffen's family arrived, little had changed. Wooden barracks replaced the tents and the capital city of Birobidzhan was under construction for the increasing number of new immigrants who didn't want to turn to agriculture, but after an initial flurry of interest by foreign Jews and communists, the JAR was largely abandoned by the outside world.
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.
VIKTOR KLEYNERMAN was six years old in 1940 when his family left Vinnitsa, Ukraine and made the exhausting month-long train trek to Birobidzhan. They were sent to a kolkhoz called Red Star, a "small village filled with mosquitoes," Kleynerman recalls.
His mother died that first year, and Viktor went to work in the fields.
"Everything we harvested was sent to the front," he says. "Nothing was left for the families. I'd collect rotten potatoes and leftover wheat from the fields to feed my two little sisters." What did persist in the JAR was Yiddish, which, as the "natural language" of Russian and Ukrainian Jews, according to Stalin, was proclaimed the region's second national language, along with Russian. Through the 1940s, Yiddish was the language of instruction in the state schools, as well as much of its literature, radio, newspapers, film and theater.
And although Stalin's purges decimated the region's Jewish leadership from 1936 to 1938 and again, with brutal finality, in 1948, Yiddish and Jewish culture lasted two decades longer and was later revived two decades earlier than anywhere else in the former Soviet Union.
Even Hebrew, discouraged from the beginning as the language of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine, could be heard in the synagogues, which were tacitly permitted until 1948. That year the last Jewish schools were closed, the library's 30,000 Jewish books were burned, and the entire political and cultural elite was sent to camps or executed. The last synagogue was destroyed in a fire in the mid-1950s.
Yet Yiddish and Jewish culture never completely disappeared, surviving the Krushchev and Brezhnev years in such expressions as a weekly Yiddish radio show and the Birobidzhaner Stern, which continued to publish in Yiddish although its content was strictly vetted by the government. Longtime Jewish residents insist they never encountered anti-Semitism in the Jewish Autonomous Region. It would have been, they point out, almost an oxymoron.
"Things were different in Birobidzhan," says city council member Yosef Brenner, 55, who is also CEO of his own metals factory and a stalwart in the local Jewish community. "When I was a child, if someone was beating up a Jew, the neighbors would step in to stop it. There might have been some street hooliganism, but no organized or state-sponsored anti-Semitism."
Brenner says that growing up, he always had a strong sense of "being Jewish," which for his family meant keeping Shabbat as "a special day with a family meal, but no candles, no rituals." He recalls his grandmother baking matza and hamentaschen every year, a memory recounted by other local Jews as well.
"We didn't have religion, but we did have Jewish culture and Jewish music," he says. Distinction was always made between Jewish culture, which was acceptable, and political or religious expression, which was not.
Brenner relates that when the Six Day War broke out in June 1967, the word "from above" was that Israel was the aggressor.
"We were told that the good Jews live in Birobidzhan and the bad Jews are in Israel." Today, he has two grown children living in Israel; his son served in the IDF, a fact Brenner recounts with pride.
DEPUTY GOVERNOR Valery Gurevich, 56, is the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the JAR. He says all he knew of Jewishness while growing up was hearing his parents and grandparents speak Yiddish.
"You could hear Yiddish on the streets through the 1970s," he recalls. "Even the Russians cursed in Yiddish. Then it slowed down."
In 1977, Yiddish theater was reestablished when the Kameri Jewish Folk Theater opened with government support. Jewish music was performed more openly, and Jewish identity became more assertive. It took a while, however, for religious practice to reenter the mainstream.
Dov Kofman, 55, leads services today at Beit Tchoova, a small congregation sponsored by former Russian chief rabbi Adolf Shayevich.
Kofman, who has a long white beard, taught himself Judaism in the early 1980s by reading the Bible in Russian, then studying Hebrew on his own. In 1983, he joined a group of Jews who had been meeting twice a year for holiday services. He says he was arrested several times for teaching Judaism, but unlike Jewish activists elsewhere in the country, was always quickly released.
Until it affiliated with the Congress of Jewish Religious Communities and Organizations of Russia (Keroor) in 1996, Kofman's ad-hoc congregation prayed together with a group of "subbotnikim," elderly Russian women who practiced a kind of Seventh-Day Adventist Christianity.
"I invited them in so the government wouldn't close our building," Kofman says. "I led the services, in Russian, but they didn't listen to what I said. They were afraid of Jews." By the early 1980s, well before perestroika, Yiddish was once again offered as an optional course in the public schools. The first Jewish Sunday school opened in 1988, Jewish holidays began to be marked by public concerts in the Palace of Culture, and a biennial Festival of Jewish Culture was organized in 1991 to run on alternate years with a Festival of Russian Culture. The state library began rebuilding its Judaica section; it now numbers about 5,000 volumes, many of them donated by KGB headquarters in Moscow, which sent Birobidzhan valuable books confiscated from Jewish activists over the years. An official Jewish community was organized, and an elegant Jewish community center building opened its doors two years ago.
Just before Rosh Hashana 2002, Chabad Rabbi Mordechai Scheiner and his wife, Esther, arrived from Israel to take over religious leadership of the city's Jewish population, estimated today at between 2,000 and 6,000 – depending on who's doing the counting, locals say with a smile.
"About 6,000 Jews are registered on the official Jewish community list, but I think there are even more," says Deputy Governor Gurevich.
He notes that 12,000 Jews have emigrated to Israel since 1989, although the 1990 census put the region's total Jewish population at just 9,000. "So one-and-a-half times as many Jews left as those who were here," he says. "When people need it, they 'remember' the Jewish grandparent they forgot about all those years."
ON SEPTEMBER 10, Birobidzhan's elegant new synagogue was formally dedicated. JAR Governor Nikolai Volkov cut the ribbon together with Russia's Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar in a gala ceremony that highlighted the close relations between the government and the local Jewish community.
That partnership carries over to the building's funding as well: The Rohr Family Foundation (principal Chabad donors in the FSU), the Joint Distribution Committee, and the regional Ministry of Culture gave heavily to the $715,000 building, which also includes classrooms, an exhibition hall and art gallery, and Birobidzhan's first kosher soup kitchen.
This same kind of Jewish revival has occurred throughout the former Soviet Union. What is unusual in Birobidzhan is that many of the people taking part in it here are not Jewish. They see Yiddish and Jewish literature, music and holidays as an integral part of their founding myth, the ideology that animated the people who built their country, and thus part of their own national heritage.
"We do not say that Birobidzhan is a Jewish city, but you can see an active revival of Jewish culture that is so popular, even non-Jews are involved in it," says Gurevich. "Most locals know what Purim is, they know about Rosh Hashana." Svetlana Sergeyevna is a senior teacher at State Kindergarten No. 28, called "Menora," which since 1991 has offered an optional Yiddish and Jewish traditions track in addition to the regular curriculum. Sixty of the school's 120 pupils are enrolled in it, many of them gentile.
"Even Russian [i.e. non-Jewish] parents and children choose to learn Jewish traditions," Sergeyevna explains. "Because we live in the Jewish Autonomous Region, it's considered not just Jewish culture, but the culture of this place. It's as if I were in America – I'd want to study American culture and language."
"There's an expression in Birobidzhan, 'You may not be Jewish, but you have to keep the Jewish traditions!'" pipes up Sophia Kirilova, one of the school's Yiddish teachers.
What constitutes "Jewish traditions" at this age? An introduction to the holidays, simple Bible stories, the same kind of things one might find in any Jewish kindergarten – with the substitution of elementary Yiddish for beginning-level Hebrew.
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, elderly survivors come to the school to tell their stories to the children, and the teachers show clips from Schindler's List and read out loud from children's books sent by the JDC.
"It's difficult to find age-appropriate material on the Holocaust," says Sergeyevna.
THIRTY-YEAR-OLD Yelena Belyaeva is a senior teacher of Yiddish at the Birobidzhan Pedagogical Institute. She's been studying Yiddish for 10 years, and Hebrew almost as long. She spent a year in Jerusalem at a course for Diaspora teachers of Hebrew, and her bookshelves are filled with books in both languages.
Belyaeva is also a prominent figure in the local Jewish community, although she is not Jewish. Nor are any of the eight students in the first-year Yiddish class she teaches at the institute, although one, 19-year-old Anastasya Cherevataya, confesses to having a Jewish grandfather. "But that's not why I'm here," Cherevataya insists, adding that her parents wanted her to study English. "They thought English would be more useful."
Nineteen-year-old Anna Kozireva says she chose Yiddish over French because Yiddish "seemed more exotic." Plus, she likes the alphabet. Only Katherine Bondarenko, also 19, articulates the same bond with Yiddish as that expressed by her teacher.
"I think it's important to know Yiddish. I live in the Jewish Autonomous Region, and this is an emotional connection to my history." Judaism's universal message is emphasized by political and cultural leaders when they try to explain why it is key to the region's self-identity.
"I grew up thinking it's quite normal to walk around with a big Star of David around your neck," says Belyaeva. "In Moscow they tell you to hide it, but here people of all nationalities have always felt free to express who they are."
At the unveiling of a bronze statue of Sholem Aleichem last month, poet and newspaper editor Igor Feinfeld declared to the gathered spectators and journalists that the great Yiddish writer may have been popular because of his humor (which showed he was, in Feinfeld's words, "a real Jew"), but he is significant because of "his universal humanism."
"I grew up on Sholem Aleichem Street, I went to Sholem Aleichem School, there's a picture of Sholem Aleichem in my office," Feinfeld told the crowd. "And even as the fashion in portraits changed [here laughter greeted his reference to the Soviet habit of taking down one dictator's picture and putting up the next], no one ever took down his picture."
But not everyone is so entranced with the emphasis put on Jewish history this past decade. Tatyana Kosvintsava is director of Birobidzhan's regional history museum, and she is proud of the Hall of Forgotten Zion the museum added in 1991, which tells the story of the early Jewish pioneers – their idealism and their eventual repression.
But she finds it distressing that schoolchildren no longer seem to know their own Russian history. "When I was at school, we studied everything about the Great Patriotic War," she says, using the Soviet-era terminology for World War II.
"We knew about every battle, we knew the names of all the heroes of the Soviet Union. Now when children visit our museum and we ask them to name a hero of the Great Patriotic War from our region, they say 'Sholem Aleichem.'"
BIROBIDZHAN TODAY is a lovely, green city. Its wide, recently paved boulevards and tree-lined streets bear witness to the economic boom enjoyed by the entire Russian Far East. Deputy Governor Gurevich notes the GNP has increased 50 percent in the past four years, and says salaries have gone up even more. Chinese laborers pour across the border looking for work, some legal, some not.
But that prosperity may taper off soon. Kosvintsava sees "very few tourists" in her museum, compared to the hordes of curious foreigners that visited in the early Nineties. Similarly, she hosted many foreign journalists from 1990 to 1995, but hasn't seen any in a long time.
"Russia was interesting to them at first, but then we had the 'gangster era' and people were afraid to visit," she says.
Gurevich echoes that picture, saying that at the beginning of perestroika, the JAR had more trade with the United States than it has today, exporting clothes to the US through South Korea and buying American equipment and machine parts in exchange.
"But for five years now, we've had little contact," he says.
Certainly some of the recent government funding for Jewish cultural activities, the menora and Sholem Aleichem statues, and the synagogue building are aimed at attracting foreign investors and tourists. Gurevich acknowledges that, adding that the government is eager to interest American businessmen in the region's mineral resources and other projects.
"But mostly, we do this for ourselves," he insists. "The government sees Jewish culture developing here. They see the festivals, they see local businessmen giving money to Jewish causes, and they want to support it."
There's a sense of hope in Birobidzhan, a palpable energy and pride that is absent in most post-Soviet cities its size. How much of that comes from its Jewish heritage can only be speculated upon.
"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."
It seemed to me that I.B. Singer was fascinated by the occult and all his novels and short stories (at least those that were written over 40 years ago) contain a lot of witchcraft and satan-worship which he describes as "Hasidism." I think that even Madonna's brand of "Judaism" is better than that.
All that I remember about his books is that they were very dreary, depressing, full of adultery and devils and witchcraft and they all had miserable endings.
Then after he died all his "friends" told "reminiscences" about how he cheated on his wife and chased after little girls.
Oh yeah, but he was a lifelong vegetarian so he has become a PETA hero.
What a sad, miserable, bitter, wasted life he must have had.
(a) Guarantees the coming of Moshiach to the Holy Land
(b) Impedes the coming of Moshiach to the Holy Land
(c) Completely prevents the coming of Moshiach to the Holy Land
(d) Has no bearing whatsoever when Moshiach appears
(e) Is the first flowering of the redemption
(f) Hastens the coming of Moshiach to the Holy Land
Living in Eretz Israel and performing mitzvot (such as shmittah, trumos u'maasrot which are deeply rooted in Eretz Israel hastens the coming of Moshiach.
Jews living in every part of the Land which was promised by G-D in the Torah hastens the coming of Moshiach.
Giving away any parts of the Holy Land to our enemies impedes and delays the arrival of Moshiach, not mention that it will also impede and delay achieving peace!
Thanks for your reply.
What do you think about the idea that only Moshiach can form the final boundaries of a Sovereign Nation State in the Holy Land ?
Your reply sounds like it comes straight out of the mouth of M.M.Schneerson. Can you tell me the reasons for your statement ?
That was indeed the Rebbe's opinion, with which I agree.
And no, I do not believe that he was Moshiach, although while he was alive he could have been.
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