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Exodus from the eastEmigration to Israel empties 'homeland' for Jews contrived in the Stalinist era
Steve Nettleton has been traveling east across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. His dispatches from towns and cities along the way report on what ordinary Russians beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg are thinking and feeling during this uncertain time in their nation's history. BIROBIDZHAN, Russia (CNN) -- In the city's only synagogue -- a plain, one-story house transformed into a sanctuary -- several women in shawls prepare to share a Saturday afternoon meal as they sit scattered along two pews. Only two men have joined the congregation, far short of the quorum of 10 needed for Shabbat prayers. A few rows in front of them the synagogue's caretaker, Boris Kaufman, who asks to be called by the Hebrew name Dov, lifts a plastic cup in offering. "Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, Who creates the fruit of the vine," he recites in Hebrew, then raises his drink to his lips. It is beer that is sanctified, not wine, but no one seems to mind. Until recently the close-knit community of Beit-T'shuva could not afford even this cheap beverage. Now with help from the Russian Jewish Congress in Moscow they can enjoy a full meal. Although the food is simple and flavorless, the Shabbat supper is spiced with laughter among friends and occasional outbursts of traditional songs. "I never came to synagogue until I became a widow," says Raisa Linshtein. "I was so depressed. My nerves were bad. I thought I was insane. I came here and calmed down. It's made a huge difference in my life." Her chorus of friends, however, has been growing smaller. Within a few years the table of Beit-T'shuva will likely stand empty, its synagogue closed. Nearly all assembled here plan to move to Israel. But not Linshtein. "It's hard for me here, but it won't be any easier in Israel," she tells the others. "I have no savings. I have no money to rent a flat. I am not brave enough to go." "We should go to Israel not to live better but to get closer to God," argues another woman at the table. "You can be close to God anywhere," Linshtein replies. A legacy of Stalinist politicsAcross town a larger and wealthier community has grand plans for reviving Judaism in Birobidzhan, capital of Russia's Jewish Autonomous Oblast. The group, named "Freid," wants to preserve the historical role this Belgium-sized piece of swampland in Russia's Far East has played since 1934, the year Josef Stalin declared it the national home of Soviet Jewry. Freid has already organized 11 cultural clubs and established a Sunday school that teaches religion to more than 100 children. It also sponsors a Jewish newspaper circulated across Russia and abroad, a radio program in Yiddish that airs four times a week, and a TV program devoted to studying the Torah. "We consider ourselves a tiny Israel," says Freid's director, Lev G. Toytman.
In a few months the community will open a new synagogue and a rabbi will come from New York to serve Birobidzhan's dwindling Jewish population. "When the new synagogue opens, the two communities [Beit-T'shuva and Freid] will come together," Toytman says. 'We should all be in Israel'Boris Kaufman of Beit-T'shuva wants nothing of it. He says Freid rarely offers any aid to his group and is skeptical of its motives. "This is politics. This initiative is not coming from Jews, but from local authorities," he says. "Russia wants no Jewish oblast, but doesn't want to be seen as discriminating against the Jews," Kaufman says. "So they spend money building synagogues and aiding culture. They make a lot of noise so no one can say they destroyed Judaism in Russia. "But in reality we live hard lives and the only way out is to go to Israel. In my heart I'm happy they do this because I want to go. Some say their motherland is here, Israel is there. But they are wrong. Very wrong." When asked what will happen to Birobidzhan's Jewish heritage if everyone leaves, Kaufman shrugs his shoulders.
"Who cares? Nobody needs Birobidzhan to remain Jewish. We should all be in Israel anyway." 'Birobidzhan saved the Jews twice'An ambitious resettlement plan that never succeeded, the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan was a misnomer from the start. Jews never comprised more than 25 percent of the population, according to local authorities, and now they are estimated to account for fewer than one in 20. The Communists, hoping to draw Jews from their bourgeois shtetl trades as shopkeepers and artisans and get them to help build a socialist economy, lured the first Soviet Jews to this remote corner in the late 1920s with promises of food subsidies and tax incentives. The Soviets also wanted a wedge of Europeans to develop and protect an area rich in natural resources from Chinese and Japanese expansion. The Jews, already thrown into disarray by pogroms and economic collapse, seemed to Moscow the perfect fit. Thousands came between 1928 and 1938, including hundreds from Europe and North America. Many arrived with romantic visions of building a Jewish homeland, an appealing notion two decades before the Jewish state of Israel was born. Others came to escape starvation from famines in Ukraine and Belarus. They could not have known it then, but their migration to the east would spare their families' again when during World War II the Nazi Holocaust swept through their former villages. "Birobidzhan saved the Jews twice: first from starvation and then from Hitler," says Larisa Milchina, a journalist and teacher of Jewish tradition. Milchina's mother, who came to Birobidzhan in the 1930s, later discovered that her hometown, the Ukrainian village of Romanovka, was the site of a Nazi massacre. | ||||||||||||||||||
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