Joseph Stalin deported them by the thousands to Russia's Far East, but those
living today in the country's Jewish enclave have begun embracing a culture long denied them by Soviet doctrine.
Yiddish classes, a Jewish culture festival and a nearly-completed synagogue cater to the nearly 10,000 Jews who live in the Jewish autonomous region created by Stalin near the Chinese border in 1934.
The republic's Jewish population dropped considerably following mass migrations to Israel in the 1990s and they now make up just over five percent of its population, which totals around 190,000. But while "Jews don't number
as many, they participate all the more in community life", the president of the region's Jewish community, Lev Toytman, said.
More than 600 people turned out to celebrate Hanukkah at a hall in the capital, Birobijan, some 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles) east of Moscow.
Yiddish was the republic's official language alongside Russian until 1949, when the creation of Israel prompted Stalin to launch his "anti-cosmopolitan" -- in plain language, antisemitic -- campaign against Jewish culture.
The language is making a widespread comeback in the republic, among Jews and
Russians alike.
Every week, Lena Belayeva welcomes a dozen Russian university students who study Yiddish as their second language. They sit alongside Jews from Ukraine
and Belarus who migrated to the region in the 1930s to found the first Jewish homeland.
"Real Yiddish is a spoken language -- the one we use at the market, not the one learned at university," Belayeva said, recalling a recent class on the Yiddish art of cursing.
Many of her students include older people who had long forgotten the language of their youth.
"I had long forgotten the words -- there was no one to speak with," said Pyotr, 64. "We were ashamed of our language."
"Even if there was just one Russian and 10 Jews, we spoke Russian," said Yossif. "My children wanted me to speak to them in Russian, they found Yiddish totally useless."
At public school number two, some 250 students take classes in Yiddish and Hebrew, as well as Jewish history and culture.
A banner in the school hall lists the Jewish holidays alongside images of "Jews famous around the world", such as writers Franz Kafka and Isaac Bashevis Singer and composer Jacques Offenbach.
"Children learn their people's history, they understand that they don't have
to hide their Jewish identity and therefore gain self-respect," said history
teacher Anna Rempel.
The region has a 30-minute Yiddish-language radio program and the biweekly Birobijaner Stern, which includes a two-page Yiddish insert and has been published since the region's founding.
While Jewish language and culture have become all the rage in Birobijan, synagogue services have had more difficulty catching on after decades of the
Soviet Union's official atheist doctrine.
Israel's strictly Orthodox Lubavich sect has sent a young rabbi to the region. He is set to oversee Birobijan's first synangogue constructed after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, due to open its doors in May.
"The rabbi must be patient. The Jews are just starting to get interested in religion," said Albina Sergeyeva, noting that the region's Jewish community had already sent away three other rabbis, judging them too "rigorous".