Jewish Autonomous Oblast (1 janv. 1934 – 1 janv. 2021)

Description:

In the Soviet Union, government policy was that each ethnic group had the right to self determination in a particular territory. Soviet law considered the Jewish people an ethnicity, but this posed a problem since the Jewish people did not have a specific territory in which they were the majority. Josef Stalin sought to solve this problem and simultaneously settle a frontier region, so his government designated the region around Birobidzhan in the Russian Far East as the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, to serve as the Jewish territory.

There were two major waves of Jewish settlement in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, both of which largely failed because of new waves of antisemitism from the Stalinist government, and because the region was inhospitable.

Nevertheless, a small Jewish community formed, and the Jewish Autonomous Oblast served as a sort of cultural center for the Jews of the Soviet Union.

Soviet antisemitism was much less severe in the JAO than elsewhere, and the JAO's Yiddish newspapers and radio became a primary source of Jewish content available to Jews throughout the Soviet Union.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, most of the Jewish population of the JAO emigrated, but the region's Jewish status and official use of Yiddish remain in effect to this day.

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