Jewish Autonomous Oblast

• 1. Introduction

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  The Jewish Autonomous Oblast sits in Russia's far east, a place where Yiddish street signs stand in a region that is now less than one percent Jewish. On the 28th of March 1928, the Presidium of the General Executive Committee of the USSR passed a decree attaching free territory near the Amur River "for settlement of the working Jews." The questions that follow from that moment are worth sitting with: Why did Stalin build a Jewish homeland on the edge of Siberia? Who actually went there? And what happened to the tens of thousands of people who tried to build a life in the taiga?

• 2. The Soviet Jewish Problem

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  By 1924, unemployment among Jews in the Soviet Union exceeded 30 percent. Soviet policies against private property had made it illegal to be a craftsperson or small business owner, which is precisely what many Jewish families had been before the revolution. The government formed Komzet, a committee for the agricultural settlement of Jews, to find a way to reintegrate them into the economy as productive workers.

  The larger ambition was ideological. Soviet leaders wanted to create a territory where Jews could live a life that was "socialist in content and national in form." They also wanted to offer a direct counter to Zionism, which was gaining strength internationally. Socialist Zionists such as Ber Borochov were drawing followers, and the Yiddish cultural movement had its own tensions with Soviet ethno-nationalism.

  Crimea was considered first in the early 1920s, and two Jewish districts were even formed there, along with three more in southern Ukraine. But a different plan won out, one driven by geography and military logic rather than by any particular concern for Jewish welfare.

• 3. Why Birobidzhan

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  General Pavel Sudoplatov wrote plainly about the government's reasoning: the establishment of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in 1928 was ordered by Stalin only to strengthen the Far Eastern border region with an outpost, not as a favour to the Jews. The area was under constant pressure from Chinese and White Russian resistance groups. The idea was to establish a settlement whose inhabitants would be hostile to those white Russian emigres, especially the Cossacks.

  Komzet itself was surprised by the choice. Before 1858, the territory had been part of Qing Chinese Manchuria. Russia had acquired it through the Treaty of Aigun in 1858 and the Convention of Peking in 1860. By the time the decree passed in 1928, about 30,000 people lived there: descendants of Trans-Baikal Cossacks, Koreans, Kazakhs, and Tungusic peoples.

  Sudoplatov also noted that Stalin deliberately designated the area as an autonomous district rather than an autonomous republic. That distinction mattered enormously: it meant no local legislature, no high court, and no government post of ministerial rank was permitted. It was a frontier outpost with a Jewish name, not a political center.

• 4. Arriving in the Taiga

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  In the spring of 1928, 654 Jews arrived to start building. By October of that same year, 49.7 percent of them had already left. The summer had brought torrential rains that flooded the crops. An outbreak of anthrax killed the cattle. The land was mountainous, covered with virgin forests of oak, pine, and cedar, and cut through with swamps. Settlers had to build their lives from scratch.

  To make colonization more appealing, the Soviet government allowed private land ownership, an unusual concession. It had an unintended effect: many non-Jews moved in to claim free farmland.

  Despite the harsh start, a promotional campaign in the 1930s used posters and Yiddish-language novels describing a socialist utopia. Leaflets were dropped from an airplane over a Jewish neighborhood in Belarus. A government-produced Yiddish film called Seekers of Happiness told the story of a Jewish family from overseas making a new life in Birobidzhan. The Organization for Jewish Colonisation in the Soviet Union, a Jewish Communist organization in North America, successfully encouraged some American residents to emigrate, including the family of the future spy George Koval, who arrived in 1932. In total, around 1,200 non-Soviet Jews chose to settle there.

• 5. A Yiddish Culture Takes Shape

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  As settlers arrived in larger numbers through the early 1930s, Yiddish culture spread across the new settlements. Streets being built in the city were named after prominent Yiddish writers, including Sholom Aleichem and I. L. Peretz. A Yiddish newspaper called the Birobidzhaner Shtern was established. A theatre troupe was created.

  Early communities took root in places like Valdgeym, which dated from 1928 and held the first collective farm established in the oblast. Amurzet served as the center of Jewish settlement south of Birobidzhan from 1929 to 1939. The Jewish population of the JAO reached a pre-war peak of 20,000 in 1937. According to the 1939 census, 17,695 Jews lived in the region, making up 16 percent of the total population.

  The region's peak came after World War II. In 1948, the Jewish population reached somewhere between 46,000 and 50,000 people, about 25 percent of the entire population of the JAO. After 1945, Birobidzhan was discussed as a possible home for Jewish refugees displaced by the war. That moment of renewed hope would not last.

• 6. The Long Decline

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  The 1959 census found that the Jewish population of the JAO had fallen by roughly 50 percent from the 1948 peak, down to 14,269 people. A synagogue that had opened at the end of World War II closed in the mid-1960s after a fire left it severely damaged.

  By 1989, according to the Soviet Census of that year, 8,887 Jews remained in the JAO, making up 4 percent of a total regional population of 214,085. In 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev's government had told the American Jewish community it would allow 11,000 Jewish refuseniks to emigrate.

  After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, emigration accelerated sharply. In early 1996, 872 people, representing 20 percent of the Jewish population at that time, left for Tel Aviv on chartered flights. As of 2002, 2,357 Jews lived in the JAO. The 2021 Russian census counted only 837 ethnic Jews in the region, or 0.6 percent of the population. Ethnic Russians by that point made up 88.8 percent of the JAO.

• 7. What Remains

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  By 2012, only a very small minority of Birobidzhan residents, mostly seniors, spoke Yiddish. Yiddish was the language of instruction in just one of the city's 14 public schools. Two schools offered compulsory Yiddish classes for children aged 6 to 10. The Birobidzhaner Shtern continued to publish two or three pages per week in the language. The Sholem Aleichem Amur State University offered a Yiddish course.

  A 2012 article noted the opening of a new Chabad-sponsored synagogue at 14a Sholom-Aleichem Street. A 2015 article described kosher meat arriving by train from Moscow every few weeks, a Sunday school in operation, and a minyan on Friday night and Shabbat.

  A 2012 religion survey found that Judaism was practiced by just 1 percent of the regional population. By contrast, 22 percent of residents identified as atheists, making the JAO one of the least religious regions in Russia. Mordechai Scheiner, who served as Chief Rabbi of the JAO from 2002 to 2011, said during his tenure that Jewish culture was enjoying a religious and cultural resurgence. In 2013, proposals to merge the JAO with Khabarovsk Krai or Amur Oblast led to protests and were ultimately rejected by residents and by the Jewish community of Russia, leaving the oblast's unusual constitutional status intact under Article 65 of the Russian Constitution.