Żydowski Obwód Autonomiczny na Syberii. Wielokulturowe dziedzictwo i współistnienie

Alessandro Vitale

doi:10.18778/2300-0562.03.07

Authors

Alessandro Vitale Department of International Studies, University of Milan, Milan 20122, Via Conservatorio 7, Italy

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2300-0562.03.07

Keywords:

interethnic relations, interethnic cooperation, Jewish Autonomous Region, JAR, Siberia, post-Soviet Russia, Birobidzhan, Khabarovsky Kraj

Abstract

Technically, Israel is not the only official Jewish homeland in the world. In the Far East of Russian Siberia there still exists the Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR) of Birobidzhan. Beginning in 1928 the Soviet Union set aside a territory larger than Belgium and Holland combined and considerably bigger than Israel, for Jewish settlement, located some five thousands miles east of Moscow along the Soviet-Chinese border, between the 48^th and 49^th parallels north latitude, where the climate and conditions are similar to Ontario and Michigan. Believing that Soviet Jewish people, like other national minorities, deserved a territorial homeland, the Soviet regime decided to settle a territory that in 1934 would become the Jewish Autonomous Region. The idea was to create a new Zion – in a move to counterweight to Palestine – where a “proletarian Jewish culture” based on Yiddish language could be developed. In fact, the establishment of the JAR was the first instance of an officially acknowledged Jewish national territory since ancient times: the “First Israel”. But the history of the Region was tragic and the experiment failed. Nevertheless, Birobidzhan’s renewed existence of today and the revival of Jewish life in the post-Soviet JAR are not only a curious legacy of Soviet national policy, but after the break-up of the Soviet Union and the worldwide religious rebirth represent an interesting case-study in order to study some challenging geographic problems, and interethnic relations.

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