[lg policy] Despite Predictions, Jewish Homeland in Birobidzhan, Russia Retains Its Appeal

Thu Oct 4 20:19:26 UTC 2012

Jewish Homeland in Birobidzhan, Russia, Retains Appeal - NYTimes.com

Despite Predictions, Jewish Homeland in Siberia Retains Its Appeal

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

BIROBIDZHAN, Russia — Andrey Zasorin, the spiritual leader of the old
synagogue here in the capital of Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region, is
a born-again Jew who found God after 23 years in prison for robbery.
Even then, he returned to Judaism only after flirting with the Russian
Orthodox and Pentecostal churches.

Yelena Sarashevskaya, the editor of the local paper, Birobidzhaner
Shtern, which still publishes two or three pages a week in Yiddish, is
not Jewish. She is a descendant of Cossacks, but married a Jew and
learned to read and write Yiddish in college.

Identity is a complex issue in the quixotic Jewish homeland
established by Stalin here in the mosquito-infested swampland of
Russia’s Far East, some 20 years before the founding of Israel. While
the big menorah standing outside the railroad station, the Yiddish
street signs and ubiquitous Stars of David give Birobidzhan the veneer
of a Jewish Disneyland, the city often seems to have the religious
authenticity of a pizza bagel with pepperoni.

Because of this gap between the city’s spirit and its spirituality —
not to mention the dwindling number of people who actually call
themselves Jews — commentators have been predicting the Jewish
Autonomous Region’s demise for decades. But whether on the Upper East
Side, or in Jerusalem, or on this last patch of Siberia along the
Chinese border, Jewish is as Jewish does. And when it comes to the
so-called Soviet Zion, Ms. Sarashevskaya, for one, is sick of the
snickering.

“I don’t blame foreign journalists, even our own native journalists
suffer from this,” Ms. Sarashevskaya said, sitting in her office on
Lenin Street. “They say, ‘Stalin’s experiment, the Birobidzhan
Project, failed’ — these are the clichés they use — and honestly it’s
annoying already. By God, we are talking about living people, you
understand. And it’s not for them to judge. History turned out this
way and made all this possible. At least the Jews who came here
survived the Holocaust. This place saved many lives.”

Of course, some survived the Nazis only to die by the thousands under
Stalin. But if coaxing Russia’s Jews virtually to the end of the land
always had the feeling of a cruel joke, the comrades in the Kremlin
could hardly have predicted the punch line.

Unlike other places contemplated for Jewish resettlement over the
years, like Uganda or Alaska or Japan, Birobidzhan, (pronounced
bi-ra-bi-JAN) cannot be written off as a historical footnote or
dismissed as fiction. Though it never became the agrarian,
socialist-Jewish utopia that some founders envisioned, Birobidzhan
remains a Jewish place.

The old synagogue, a ramshackle, one-story wooden house, is still
functioning, after closing briefly in the mid-1990s. A new synagogue,
financed by the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement, has been built in
the center of downtown, along with a Jewish community center. Sholem
Aleichem Street remains the main road, and a statue of the Fiddler on
the Roof still greets concertgoers outside the symphony hall.

No doubt, the Jewish population has dropped, to less than 7 percent of
the 76,000 people who live in Birobidzhan, and less than 2 percent in
the wider region. Very few are religious.

But some Jews who left for Israel after the collapse of the Soviet
Union have returned — tugged home even from the Promised Land, which
still cannot promise peace or tranquillity.

On the same weekend last month, Birobidzhan celebrated Rosh Hashana
and the city’s 75th anniversary. Visitors arrive by train, a stop on
the Trans-Siberian, to see the city’s name written in huge Yiddish
letters. One local elementary school still teaches Yiddish.

“For me Birobidzhan was a shock, because I was born in Yiddish
civilization,” said Marek Halter, the French-Jewish novelist, who was
so struck by the place when he visited in 2011 that he made a
documentary film, “Birobidzhan, Birobidzhan,” and wrote a novel set in
the city. “It was like Jurassic Park.”

Among the Jews to return to Birobidzhan from Israel is Gershon Riss,
whose son, Eliyahu, 22, is now the rabbi of the new synagogue.

“In 2004, after a long absence, we came here for vacation,” Mr. Riss
said. “We saw new buildings, a new, beautiful synagogue and the
revival of the Jewish culture.”

As a boy, Mr. Riss recalled going to the Yiddish theater with his
father, to see productions like “Tevye the Milkman,” by Sholem
Aleichem, and “The Witch,” by Abraham Goldfaden.

Officials recently announced that they had allocated land for the
city’s first mosque. At the ceremony, Roman Leder, a Jewish leader,
gave the local imam a copy of the Old Testament.

Berel Lazar, the chief rabbi of Russia, said in an interview in Moscow
that Stalin’s goal was to exile Russia’s Jews to where “they wouldn’t
be able to do much harm.” Historians say another goal was to use the
Jews as a buffer between Russia and China.

As a result, Rabbi Lazar said, Birobidzhan was never really a
homeland. “Is it any more Jewish than any other area of Russia? Surely
not,” he said. “He took the Jewish soul out of the Jewish people.”

But while Jewish imagery is rare in Moscow or St. Petersburg,
Birobidzhan revels in it. Even signs in Russian often use a Hebraic
calligraphy. Such pride was not always in evidence.

“There were times when we were young when it was not very convenient
to be Jewish, it was even dangerous,” said Vilen I. Arnapolin, who, on
Dec. 24, 1937, became the very first baby recorded in the city’s birth
records. “Now everybody wants to be Jewish.”

But to say a renaissance is under way would be going too far.

Mr. Arnapolin’s daughter and two grandchildren have assimilated and
are listed as Russian, not Jewish, in their passports. His
granddaughter, Vlada Yakshina, 18, is studying not Yiddish but
Chinese.

There is no kosher supermarket or restaurant — only a Chinese chef
named Van Bao-lin, who goes by Kolya, serves up the occasional
schnitzel and delights in toasting guests at his restaurant with a
hearty “L’Chaim!”

The religious, meanwhile, are surviving as best they can.

Mr. Zasorin, who rejoined the synagogue his grandmother attended when
he was a boy, leads an aging congregation, called Beit T’Shuvah —
House of Redemption — that often cannot muster the 10 men required for
a prayer group. The rabbi of the new synagogue, Eliyahu Riss, is
hoping its Sunday school will engage a new generation.

Riva Khaskelevna Shmain, a founding Birobidzhaner who recently
celebrated her 78th birthday, said she has hope for the future. “There
is a Jewish kindergarten,” she said. “So I think all this will
continue.”

Ms. Sarashevskaya, the editor, said those who declared Stalin’s
experiment a failure missed the point. “Of course, this is not
Israel,” Ms. Sarashevskaya said. “But that was not the goal. The
Jewish Autonomous Region is wonderful as it is. This is a quiet,
tranquil and cozy place, good for married couples, elderly people and
children.” She added, “This is a Jewish place.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/04/world/europe/jewish-homeland-in-birobidzhan-russia-retains-appeal.html?ref=world&_r=0&pagewanted=print

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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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