Word: birobidzhan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...last of his five dispatches last week, Reporter Frankel managed to send through Moscow's censors a far soberer picture-a picture of an old Soviet propagandists' paradise, the rarely visited Jewish Autonomous Province of Birobidzhan on the northern border of Manchuria. Founded with great fanfare in 1934 as "an empty plot on which the Soviet Jews were to pioneer without getting mixed up with Zionism," Birobidzhan is today, as Frankel describes it, a sad little whistle stop on the Trans-Siberian Railroad that "jet planes, hope, energy and momentum pass...
...Last February a British Communist, Professor Hyman Levy, charged that "today there is not a single Jew in the Central Committee, and indeed no Jew in any high position." Last month French Journalist Serge Groussard asked Khrushchev about reports that even in Stalin's old Jewish colony of Birobidzhan in eastern
Siberia, Yiddish signs, schoolbooks and newspapers are no longer to be seen. Anything but reassuring, Khrushchev's reply raised a fresh outcry from Jewish leaders in Paris, New York, Tel Aviv. The Soviet boss baldly labeled Birobidzhan a "failure" and in laying the blame on Jewish "individualism" and "intellectualism" seemed to single out the Jews as an element unfitted for Soviet collectivism...
Stalin remarked that "the Jewish problem was a very difficult one, that the Russians had tried to establish a national home for the Jews in Birobidzhan, but they had only stayed there two or three years and then scattered to the cities...