Jewish homeland in Russia resembles forgotten dream
REUTERS

BIROBIDZHAN, RUSSIA, JANUARY 12: Zion was never meant to be this cold. There is snow in every direction the eye can see, coating forests, rivers, steppe and distant hills.

Russia's Jewish autonomous region, founded as a socialist Jewish homeland in 1934, is larger than Belgium and lies in the far east of Siberia, skirting China's border. The crumbling apartment blocks of the main town of Birobidzhan look like an old, forgotten dream.

Seven decades ago thousands of Soviet Jews flooded into the area, some fired with enthusiasm to build a new society in the resource-rich region, others merely hungry and looking for a chance to improve their living conditions.

Fira Kofman was among the early settlers. She arrived in 1936,straight out of technical college 9,000 km and eight time zones away in the Belarussian capital Minsk.

``The first Jewish settlers lived in tents,'' she said. ``When they arrived the only people here were a few hunters and fishermen.''

``At first building was very hard,'' said Kofman, who stillworks every day as the guide in a museum describing the construction of Birobidzhan.

``We had almost no tools and did everything by hand, but we wanted to come to a new place and build, despite the taiga, the swamps, and the tough conditions. We knew what to expect, but we were young,'' she said.

The harsh environment - warm muggy summers and sub-zero winters - discouraged many early settlers who went back to European Russia and Ukraine. But enough of them stayed on, building a community with Yiddish-language schools, a theatre and a newspaper.

Despite Birobidzhan's huge distance from Moscow, it was not remote enough to shelter from Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's purges during the late 1930s when most local leaders were shot.

Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.