Stalin's Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland: An Illustrated History 19281996

About this book

Robert Weinberg and Bradley Bermans carefully documented and extensively illustrated book explores the Soviet governments failed experiment to create a socialist Jewish homeland. In 1934 an area popularly known as Birobidzhan a sparsely populated region along the Sino-Soviet border some five thousand miles east of Moscow was designated the national homeland of Soviet Jewry. Establishing the Jewish Autonomous Region was part of the Kremlins plan to create an enclave where secular Jewish culture rooted in Yiddish and socialism could serve as an alternative to Palestine. The Kremlin also considered the region a solution to various perceived problems besetting Soviet Jews. Birobidzhan still exists today but despite its continued official status Jews are a small minority of the inhabitants of the region. Drawing upon documents from archives in Moscow and Birobidzhan as well as photograph collections never seen outside Birobidzhan Weinbergs story of the Soviet Zion sheds new light on a host of important historical and contemporary issues regarding Jewish identity community and culture. Given the persistence of the "Jewish question" in Russia the history of Birobidzhan provides an unusual point of entry into examining the fate of Soviet Jewry under communist rule.