What is the deal with this? I know it is in Asia somewhere. Did Russia (or the USSR) think they could establish a state similar to Isreal for thier own Jewish folk.
Anyone know the SD??
No such thing.
I doubt that Russian Jews would take kindly to being “ghettoized” or “concentrated” in one place. There’s a lot of antisemitism in Russia but the Jewish people are pretty well integrated into normal society. Soviet history has a lot of incidences of mass forced movements of people from one area to another - ethnic Germans, Chechyns - but the Soviets never rounded up the Jewish people.
There are a lot of ethnic concentrations all over the vast former empire, and Asia is particularly a crazy quilt of clans, tribes, and races. There are also some ethnic states within today’s Russia - Tatarstan, Chechnya - but no official Jewish state or concentration of any kind.
Interestingly, If you look at a detailed map of the Republic of Kyrgyzstan on the Chinese border you will see little spots in the west that are Uzbekistan and Tajikistan territory. That’s because those spots are mountain valleys and the people in those valleys are not related to the Kyrgyz. So Kyrgyzstan holds the surrounding mountains and the valleys are isolated little pockets of citizens of another country. Fortunately they are making an effort to be friendly and cooperative.
There were Jewish villages in several areas of Poland and Russia. And they were far from a secure state of Israel. They were targets of Cossack attacks.
Most of those villages were destroyed during the Holocaust.
By the way, do we have a double thread going on here?
Yes, actually there is a Jewish Autonomous Region in Asian Russia. Its capital is Birobidzhan, and it’s located along the Amur River, north of China.
Basically, it was one of Stalin’s plans to get those pesky Zionists out of his hair, and win their loyalty at the same time by giving them a homeland. I think it was created during the 30’s, and was actually fairly sucessful for a while. It drew Jews from all over the S.U. as well as from Europe and America. It was a purely voluntary move to a land that ended up being Siberian swamp of the first grade.
This was in a period when the reality of a Jewish state in Palestine seemed so remote, people were offering all sorts of areas for Jewish colonization. I seem to remember that the U.K. offered Uganda.
There was a fairly substantial Jewish community there before WWII, and even until the fall of the S.U. Since then, most Birobidzhan Jews have emmigrated to Israel. I think they still have a Yiddish newspaper and radio station though.
I stand corrected. I asked a Russian before I posted.
Al…one more thing.
Who told you this? This was called a Pogrom. My family in Lithuania was run out in the pogroms. The Russians kinda rode through the town(not unlike what is depicted in Fiddler on the roof), and burned, raped, pillaged Etc.
These went on for years and years…kinda like a tradition.
-Sam
Oh my GaWd, I thought the pogroms all occurred pre-Soviet Union, under the Czars. I’ve read about them and they were more like race riots than any kind of official policy. Cossacks riding into little farm towns and hacking all the Jewish people up with swords and burning down their homes was a pre-Communism phenomena and was not a part of any official policy to relocate people to a Jewish concentration/homeland area.
Sorry for the “bump” but I just had some more Russians over to my house. We discussed this and one told me that “Yeah, that’s where Stalin sent them.” We got out the 1993 National Geographic map of Russia and there, tucked into the southeast corner of Russia on the Chinese border, is “Yevrey (Jewish) A. Oblast”. (“Yevrey” is Russian masculine for “Jew”. “Jewess” is “Yevreyka”.) It’s a small Russian state south of the Amur region. There is a state in Russia today named “Jew State”.
I’ve read a lot of books on Russia and travelled a lot around the former Soviet Union and thought I was a bit of an expert, but the SDMB is an often humbling place.
–Humbling, but educational. You and I both got something out of this.