The new wave of emigration started in the late 1980's, when hundreds of Soviet Jews took advantage of the USSR's recently relaxed travel laws. With the new freedom of travel came greater freedom of speech, and the beginnings of a revival of Jewish culture in Birobidzhan: the city is now home to a number of Jewish institutions that didn't exist before 1988: a school, two Sunday schools, a restaurant, a summer camp for children, a cultural center.
School #2, which was founded as a Jewish school in 1932 and then closed in a wave of repression in 1949, began offering Hebrew and Yiddish lessons again in 1991. The school is now divided into a Russian section and a Jewish section, but all students in the lower grades take some courses in Jewish culture and history.
The stigma attached to earlier generations of Jewish children is nowhere in
evidence: the students in School #2 blithely shuffle off to rehearsals for the
Rosh
Hashana pageant and study Yiddish among their Russian schoolmates. Children
whose parents once hid their own Jewish identity in shame are now blissfully
unaware that being Jewish means anything but a chance to possibly move to Israel,
where they've heard it's much warmer than in Russia.