Monday, December 23, 2002
Minus 50 in winter, but we love it: Russia's Jews
Agence France-Presse Waldheim, Russia, December 23
While the Far Eastern region of Birobijan never became the magnet for the millions of Russian Jews Stalin intended it to be, the few Jews actually living there say they are devoted to their official homeland.
"Birobijan still has a role to play for the Jews who have remained here and for those who returned from Israel" after emigrating there in the 1980s and 1990s, said Boris Rak, of the small town of Waldheim, whose parents were among the first Jewish settlers to come to this small territory in the late 1920s.
Founded between 1928 and 1934, when it was officially declared an Autonomous Jewish Region, Birobijan was supposed to become the Russian Jews' homeland. The Soviet dictator intended the region, and its eponymous capital, to be an ideological rival to the Jewish homeland that was gradually taking shape in Palestine under a British mandate, as well as a means to populate an almost deserted territory that he saw at risk of being invaded by neighbouring China.
He devoted massive propaganda efforts to attracting settlers to the territory, but, apart from a few hundreds of Jews lured from the United States and Argentina, only 40,000 arrived from the rest of Russia, out of a total Russian Jewish population that then numbered some 2.5 million. But as everything had to be built from scratch, and owing to extremely cold winters, half of them left barely a few months after arriving there, US historian Robert Weinberg writes in his book, Birobijan, 1928-1996. "Winters were terrible, with temperatures sometimes reaching minus 50 degrees centigrade. Sometimes, a train of settlers would arrive, only for half of them to leave almost immediately," says 81-year-old Ziama Gefen, whose family left the Volga region to settle there in 1928.
And massive emigration to Israel and Germany in the 1980s and 1990s further depleted Birobijan's already small Jewish population.
Today, there are just 10,000 Jews in the Autonomous Jewish Region out of a total Birobijani population of 180,000, and the overwhelming majority of Russia's 500,000 to 1 million Jews live elsewhere.
But those who do live in Birobijan say they are devoted to it and do not want the region to be demoted to just another Russian territory. "Birobijan is roughly the size of Israel, but life is much better here," says Rak, whose daughter emigrated to Israel but moved back after three years out of homesickness.
"She missed the snow, and even the cold, and could not get used to the taste of Israeli fruit and vegetables," says Rak's wife Maria, who head's Waldheim's small museum.
One hundred and fifty families who had left Birobijan for Israel returned last year, said the region's governor, Valery Gurevich.
In the early 1950s, Stalin planned to massively deport Soviet Jews to Birobijan, as part of the "anti-cosmopolitan" -- in plain language, antisemitic -- campaign he launched in 1949, and only his death in March 1953 prevented him from implementing his scheme.
But to Birobijan's Jews, their region saved them from an even worse disaster: the Nazi holocaust.
Many of them originally came from the Soviet Union's western areas, where hundreds of thousands perished at the hands of German forces following their 1941 invasion of the country.
The Jews of Birobijan, on the other hand, lived safely throughout World War Two.
"My grandmother often said that if we had stayed in Ukraine, where our family came from, we would have all perished," says Albina Sergeyeva, who is responsible for Birobijan's daily radio program in Yiddish, a language still partly spoken there.
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