Word: birobidzhan
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...public schools; they simply are not taught. Since the 1940s, the Hebrew and Yiddish theater has been almost completely closed down. The only Yiddish periodical that is allowed to be published is a monthly journal edited by a party hack. The so-called Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan, which Stalin set up as a showplace in Siberia, has only 30,000 Jews in a population of 163,000. The Soviet Jew is also handicapped by a strict quota system in universities and higher training schools. Jews may make up only 3% of the total, and while that figure is twice...
...massive purge that erased nearly every trace of Jewish culture. Three Yiddish journals were banned; a Yiddish publishing house was closed; four Yiddish theaters went by the boards; 450 Yiddish writers, painters, actors and musicians were slaughtered. Only a pallid, two-page newspaper published twice a week in remote Birobidzhan on the Manchurian border kept the dim flame from guttering out. Last week that flame got its first fuel in 13 years as 25,000 copies of a new bimonthly Yiddish literary magazine, Sovietish Heimland (Soviet Homeland), came off the presses in Moscow...
...Jews since World War II. The total population of an area twice the size of New Jersey is barely 160,000, "half Jewish, two-thirds urban." Young Jews leave to seek better opportunities elsewhere; Frankel met one in the train who spoke with "contempt" of the city of Birobidzhan (pop. 60,000) as "a city of three streets...
...Really Busy on Sunday." "Jewish farmers are said to do as well as most farmers in the region. Still, more meat and eggs are badly needed in Birobidzhan. Even city dwellers keep chickens. At the market on Friday, as a dozen peasants sell garlic, Indian nuts, onions and a few eggs, the visitor is told that it is really busy on Sunday...
...People are dressed, as elsewhere in the Soviet Union, darkly, adequately. In Birobidzhan locally produced shoes and accessories are perhaps a bit more stylish. The Trans-Siberian stops for ten minutes four times a day in each direction, and as the traveler waits for the train at the little station, a local culture official asks whether there are vegetables to be had in America...