Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Jewish Autonomous Oblast (JAO) is a federal subject of Russia in the far east of the country, bordering Khabarovsk Krai, Amur Oblast, and Heilongjiang province in China. Its administrative center is the town of Birobidzhan. Under Article 65 of the Constitution of Russia, it is the country's only autonomous oblast.
The JAO was established primarily for military and strategic reasons. General Pavel Sudoplatov wrote that Stalin ordered it in 1928 to strengthen the Far Eastern border against Chinese and White Russian resistance groups, not as a favour to Jews. The Soviet government also wanted to counter Zionism and reintegrate unemployed Jews, whose unemployment rate exceeded 30 percent by 1924, into the Soviet economy.
The Jewish population of the JAO peaked at around 46,000-50,000 people in 1948, making up approximately 25 percent of the entire regional population. This followed renewed interest in Birobidzhan as a potential home for Jewish refugees after World War II. By the 2021 Russian census, only 837 ethnic Jews remained, representing 0.6 percent of the population.
Yiddish is a recognized minority language under the JAO's statute of 1997, but the community is almost exclusively Russian-speaking. As of 2012, only a very small minority, mostly seniors, spoke Yiddish. Yiddish was the language of instruction in just one of Birobidzhan's 14 public schools, and two schools offered compulsory Yiddish classes for children aged 6 to 10.
Jewish emigration from the JAO accelerated after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. By that point, most Jews had already left the Soviet Union, and the remaining Jews made up fewer than 2 percent of the local population. In early 1996, 872 people, or 20 percent of the Jewish population at that time, emigrated to Israel on chartered flights.
The Tongjiang-Nizhneleninskoye railway bridge is a 2.215 km long, $355 million bridge linking Nizhneleninskoye in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast with Tongjiang in China's Heilongjiang Province. It opened in 2021 and transports more than 3 million tonnes of cargo and 1.5 million passengers per year.