Birobidzhan, (continued)

To convince Jews to move, the Soviet government offered free railroad passage, free food along the way, and 600 rubles to each settler, and Soviet propaganda organs produced pictures of smiling workers hauling grain and driving tractors in the Soviet version of the promised land. Jews came from all over the world -- Argentina, the US, even Palestine -- to settle in communes in the new homeland.

But many of the European Jews who made the trip did so because, in David Waiserman's words, they were "nuleviki": people who had absolutely nothing, and therefore had nothing to lose. And in the1930's, there was an even more compelling reason for Soviet Jews, especially from Ukraine, to come to Birobidzhan. Tens of thousands of Soviets were suffering and dying of starvation in the first half of that decade under Stalin's brutal collectivization policies. "We left Ukraine to escape hunger," says Maria Shokhtova, a Yiddish teacher at School #2 who came to a small village outside Birobidzhan as a young woman in1932. "I don't think anyone in those days came for religious reasons. People didn't want to starve to death."

The first exodus from Birobidzhan began almost as soon as the settlers arrived. According to David Waiserman, 41,000 Jews arrived in Birobidzhan between 1928-1938. By the end of 1938, 28,000 of those Jews had already turned around and left.

Many of the Jews that stayed were shot or sent to gulags in the purges of the 1930's. World War II was then followed by a wave of religious repression in the late 1940's, after which the region more or less stabilized until the final days of the Soviet Union.



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