In one of Soviet history's odder twists, the state attempted to give its Jews a "homeland" far from civilization as they knew it. In 1928 the government chose an area of East Siberia, close to China, to be a secular, socialist Jewish homeland and a place to settle impoverished Ukrainian and Byelorussian Jews. Although the idea was publicized as a Jewish homeland where Jewish pioneers would learn to be collective farmers, Jewish immigration there was actually meant to provide the government with manpower to exploit the area's rich resources and maintain a Soviet presence on the Chinese border. Non-Soviet Jews came too, enticed by Moscow's promise to help them build a "Zion" in the USSR. "My grandfather told me how people were standing in line to get here!" a Birobijan man recalled. "So many came, including my whole family, to get something better." Between 1928 and 1938, about 40,000 Jews settled in Birobijan, becoming almost one-fourth of the area's population. Jews in Europe and North America, including Albert Einstein, sent money, supplies, and "pioneers." But help from abroad was insufficient, and the promised help from the state never materialized. For many the dream quickly turned into a nightmare. At journey's end, people found themselves stranded. Families with no experience in farming, building construction, farm management, or land draining were on their own in an inhospitable region of bitterly cold winters and mosquito-ridden summers. There were no barns, no livestock, and no proper tools or equipment for farming. In the early years of Birobijan, people lived in tents, shabby barracks, or roofed-over holes in the ground. New arrivals sometimes had to sleep outside, waiting for tents to arrive or barracks to be built. Most families with the wherewithal to leave—left. Others had to stay and tough it out as best they could, some forced into begging and prostitution to survi"e. As soon as emigration to North America, Israel, or Germany became possible in the 1970s, Birobijani Jews, many of them from families that had long since hidden or forgotten their Jewish roots, scrambled to document their Jewish heritage in order to leave the Jewish Autonomous Region and the USSR.
World History
