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September 24, 2004/Tishri 9 5765, Vol. 57, No. 4
Yiddish is 'homeland' language
SUE FISHKOFF
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
BIROBIDZHAN, Russia - Sholem Aleichem never set foot in Birobidzhan - until now.
A 20-foot-tall statue of the Yiddish writer was unveiled Sept. 17 in front of the Hotel Vostok in the capital city of this area that Stalin designated as a Jewish homeland.
The unveiling was part of celebrations marking the dedication of a new Jewish community building, containing a Chabad-sponsored synagogue and a kosher soup kitchen, donated by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
Sholem Aleichem now stands watch over it all, seated in his bronze chair on - where else - Sholem Aleichem Street.
"Sholem Aleichem is not just a name, it's how we greet each other in public," declared Gov. Nikolai Volkov at the unveiling ceremony. "His work reflects the life of the Jewish people in the shtetl - the tears and the joy, the search for happiness. He's become part of our Russian culture."
Birobidzhan arguably is the only place in the world where Yiddish culture and language is a living part of a non-Jewish community's sense of self. Fewer than 5 percent of the city's 80,000 residents are Jewish, but Yiddish is everywhere - and now increasingly is joined by Hebrew.
Yiddish has been an integral part of life in the Jewish Autonomous Region since Jews started moving there in 1928 at Stalin's urging.
Eager to deflect the Jewish intelligentsia from immigrating to Palestine, Stalin posited this swampy, windswept territory 5,000 miles east of Moscow as an alternative national homeland after earlier attempts to resettle Soviet Jews in Ukraine and Crimea failed.
The first Jewish arrivals settled the land, establishing collective farms along the lines of the first kibbutzim in Palestine. But unlike Israel, where the revival of Hebrew was key, Yiddish was declared the second national language of the autonomous region, along with Russian. More than 100 Yiddish schools flourished, along with theater, music, literature and journalism.
In 1949, Stalin's anti-Jewish purges were in full swing. Birobidzhan's cultural and political elite disappeared into the camps or were shot. The Yiddish schools, theater, library and synagogues were shut down or destroyed.
In the 1960s, the first Yiddish theater reappeared in the capital city. It was joined by a second in 1977, and Yiddish again became part of the public school curriculum in the early 1980s.
But the generation that came of age in the 1950s and 1960s lost out. Yosef Brenner, a city council member and CEO of a metal factory, says his father used to attend the city's last remaining synagogue before it burned down in the 1950s.
Brenner learned Yiddish by hearing his grandmother speak it to his parents. "Things were different in Birobidzhan," he says. "When I graduated from school in 1965, I had a strong sense of being Jewish. We didn't have Jewish religion, but we had Jewish culture."
That meant, he says, everything from a weekly Yiddish program on the radio to matzo on Passover and family dinners every Shabbat-without the ritual components, he emphasizes.
Today, the city's 14 public schools must teach Yiddish and Jewish tradition. But most of them do a perfunctory job, says Lilia Valyevich, a music teacher in the Menora kindergarten.
That's why, she says, Menora was created in 1991. It is a public school that offers a half-day Yiddish and Jewish curriculum for those parents who choose it. About half the school's 120 pupils are enrolled in the Yiddish course.
"I think it's important to know Yiddish in Birobidzhan," says Katerhain Bondarenko, 19. "I live in the Jewish Autonomous Region, and I want to know about Jewish traditions. It's an emotional connection, a part of my history."
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