If there had been no synagogue there,they would have had to invent it: the case of the Birobidzhan “religious community of the Judaic creed” on the threshold of perestroika

The Birobidzhan Jewish religious community, officially registered on 15 December 1946, was the only one recognised by the Soviet authorities in the USSR's Far East. During the first years of its activity the community represented a unique case – perhaps the only case in the country – of linkage between a synagogue and the Soviet party and economic establishment on the local level. However, the persecutions of the early 1950s and several anti-religious campaigns later resulted in the Birobidzhan religious community falling into to a very sorry condition. At the beginning of the 1980s, the Regional Executive Committee even decided to cancel the registration of the community and remove it from the books. At the same time, after the 1984 large-scale celebration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR), the central Soviet authorities found that Birobidzhan “clericals” could serve the purposes of the Soviet agitation and propaganda apparatus, as confirmation of the absence of any oppression of Judaism in the JAR. As a result, the chairman of the Regional Executive Committee of Russian origin was removed from his position and a new chairman of Jewish origin was appointed. Furthermore, for the first time in decades, not counting the construction of the temporary synagogue at the Olympic village in Moscow in 1980, Soviet municipal authorities took an active part in the establishment of a Jewish house of worship.     

Jews in Belorussia's judicial system, 1944–1953

The relationship and cultural transfer between Jews and Belorussians are still rather unexplored topics. This article aims at analysing a historical process neglected by the historians of both the Jewish people and the Soviet Union: the “Belorussianisation” of the Jewish people in the interwar period. It proposes to scrutinise the impact of the nationalities policy on the crystallisation of a Belorussian‐Jewish identity. On the one hand, it is obvious that Belorussian leading political figures, influenced by Jewish intellectuals, proved to be very favourable to the development of the Jewish culture and to a Jewish‐Belorussian rapprochement. On the other hand, this study suggests that the achievements of the Soviet nationalities policy with regard to the “Belorussianisation” of Jews were ambiguous. In the three fields studied – education, scholarship and art – the results appeared to be mitigated and paradoxical. The “indigenisation” policy led to a separation of the Jewish and Belorussian educational system but stimulated the flourishing of a joined Belorussian‐Jewish scholarship. In contrast, the most profound and fruitful encounter between the Jewish and Belorussian cultures occurred in a domain, the visual arts, where the Belorussian government did not set a clear policy of rapprochement.     

Haunting images: stereotypes of Jewishness among Russian Jewish immigrants in Germany

Glancing at the Jewish spaces in contemporary Germany, an occasional observer would probably be startled. Since the Russian Jewish migration of the 1990s, Germany's Jewish community has come to be the third-largest in Europe. Synagogues, Jewish community centres, and Jewish cultural events have burgeoned. There is even talk about a “Jewish renaissance” in Germany. However, many immigrants claim that the resurrection of Jewish life in Germany is “only a myth,” “an illusion.” This paper is part of a project exploring the processes of the reconstruction of Jewish identities and Jewish communal life by Russian Jewish immigrants in Germany. The focus of this paper is on the stereotypes of Jews and Jewishness evident in immigrants' perceptions and imaginings of their physical gathering spaces – the Jewish community centres (Gemeinden). Focusing on the images that haunt a particular place, I seek to shed light upon the difficulties of re/creating Jewish identity and life among the Russian Jewish immigrants in contemporary Germany.     

Jewish response to the non-Jewish question: “Where were the Jews during the fighting?” 1941–5

ABSTRACT

The war of the USSR against Nazi Germany led to an increase of negative expressions in regard to Jews. Often members of the Soviet population accused Jews of avoiding combat, of cowardice, and of an inherent incapacity to feel patriotic toward Russia. Such a view was an adaptation of prewar anti-Jewish prejudices to war-time conditions. Some Jews, both at the front and in the rear, viewed these expressions as a sign of the emergence of an ethnic inequality that did not exist in the prewar Soviet Union. Increased Jewish sensitivity to one aspect of the theme of equality (the idea that Jews were fighting as well and as bravely as members of other ethnic groups) inclined Soviet Jews to prefer the term and concept of “Soviet” rather than those of “Russian.” The former represented for them a state of all its ethnic groups, including the Jews, while the latter appeared to reflect a priority accorded to a single ethnic group, the Russians. Anti-Jewish attitudes in the Soviet rear and, to some extent, at the front as well, was one factor that led to the reinforcement of the Soviet Jewish identity.     

Post-Soviet Nostalgia in Israel? Historical Revisionism and Artists of the 1.5 Generation

ABSTRACT

The article examines contemporary Israeli poetry and visual art by Russian-Jewish artists of the 1.5 generation, artists who were born in the Soviet Union but resettled in Israel during the 1990s. By focusing on the representation of the Soviet–Jewish past in their works, I show that in contrast to the largely negative view of the Soviet experience by the previous generations of Russian-Israeli authors, the historical understanding of the 1.5 generation is fundamentally different. This cohort of artists resists the lachrymose portrayal of Jewish life in the USSR and the “Happily Ever After” finale in Israel. Instead, they propose a counter-narrative that is hinged on a romanticized depiction of life in the USSR and disillusionment in Israel that followed. I argue that nostalgic representations of the Soviet–Jewish past by these artists derive from the suffering, humiliation, and rapid downwards social mobility that the Russian-speaking community experienced in Israel.     

THE AMBIGUITIES OF EXTERNAL MINORITY PROTECTION

This article focuses on the special and prominent place that the “Jewish question” occupied in the general discussion about Russian modernisation in the pre‐1914 period, both in American society and in the arena of US–Russian relations. It analyses the role that anti‐Jewish violence in Russia had in effecting a dramatic shift in the way Americans viewed the Russian Empire, which was being depicted by the American Jews and the leaders of the crusade for a “Free Russia” as a barbarous oppressor of political dissent and a savage persecutor of religious, national, and ethnic minorities. American society’s reaction to anti‐Jewish violence in the Russian Empire at the turn of the twentieth century helped, on the one hand, to shape the idea of the American belief that the United States bore special responsibility for carrying out reforms in Russia, and, on the other hand, to place relations between the two countries within such binary oppositions as “light and darkness,” “civilization and barbarity,” “modernity and medievalism,” “democracy and authoritarianism,” “freedom and slavery,” “the West and the Orient.” The article uses a broad range of verbal and graphic sources from the American press and new sources from archival collections. These sources help to illustrate one of the author’s principal tenets which holds that the United States’ view of the foreign policy of the Russian Empire was a result of the Americans’ projection of their own vision of the nature of the US foreign policy. In their official and public discourses, Americans considered Russia’s foreign policy an extension of Russia’s political regime. This study examines US foreign policy as a vital sphere in which national identity is redefined and reaffirmed and gives an opportunity to draw attention to the cultural and ideological dimensions of Russian–American relations, to understand the origins of dualistic American myths about Russia that have proven so enduring, and to demonstrate how a demonised Russia serves to revitalise American nationalism and how the Russian “Other” was used, in part, to construct the American “Self.”     

The final chapter: Agro‐Joint workers – victims of the Great Terror in the USSR, 1937–40

This article deals with the final chapter in the history of the Agro‐Joint, an organisation created by the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and operating in the USSR between 1924 and 1938. Among a large number of “counter‐revolutionaries” – a term used in the USSR during the time of the Great Purge of 1937–8 – one of the lesser‐known repressed groups consisted of the workers of the Agro‐Joint. With the opening of ex‐KGB archives in the former Soviet Union additional aspects of the Agro‐Joint venture have emerged in chilling detail. By virtue of their organisational status and their association with foreigners, many Agro‐Joint workers became direct subjects of the “operational orders” of the NKVD and were persecuted in three areas; Moscow, Ukraine and Crimea. There was an extraordinary brutality to the sentences; around 30 Agro‐Joint employees (from directors to members of collective farms) were arrested and a majority of them were sentenced to death. Employees of the three Agro‐Joint offices, refugee doctors whom Agro‐Joint brought into the USSR from Germany, Jewish religious activists and the staff of the Soviet organizations KOMZET and OZET were all caught in the same web, and accused of “collaboration with a counterrevolutionary organization, founded by the director of Agro‐Joint Dr. Rosen.” Accompanied by two sample documents from interrogation files as well as a list of Agro‐Joint workers who fell in the line of duty, the article presents a new outlook on this important era in the history of the JDC and Soviet Jewry.     

The shtetl in the museum: representing Jews in the eras of Stalin and Putin

This article considers the representation of the shtetl in two museum narratives devoted to Jews in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. The first, the state-funded 1939 exhibit “The Jews in Tsarist Russia and the USSR” was organized by the Jewish Section of the State Museum of Ethnography in Leningrad and remained on display to the Soviet public until the Nazi invasion in June 1941. The second is the privately funded Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, which opened in 2012. Though conceived under radically different ideological and political circumstances, each exhibition conveys a significant message about the place of Jews in Soviet and post-Soviet society, respectively, and each positions the shtetl as a formative arena for Jewish civic identity vis-à-vis the Russian homeland. Across the chasm of over seventy years, these two museum projects raise strikingly similar questions about how and why cultural institutions are mobilized to define the relationship of Ashkenazi Jews and the state. In both cases, the shtetl plays a significant role in narrating this unequal relationship.     

Regional Features and the Socio-Demographic Development of the Jews of Podilia

ABSTRACT

This article examines how the Jewish national minority of Podilia – a historical-geographical region mainly in the central part of Ukraine – formed. Considerable attention is given to the demographic processes within the Jewish environment of the region and features of formation of the social characteristics of the Jewish population that manifested themselves in its resettlement, formation of localities, self-government, and professional employment. This article shows that one of the biggest Eastern European Jewish communities was formed in Podilia before the beginning of World War II. This community was represented by the largest Jewish subethnic group – Ashkenazim. The social features of the Jews of the region were determined by the fact that the Jewish population lived in small towns of the primarily agrarian region. In addition, during this period, its social structure and professional employment were determined by both national customs and traditions and the power policy.

This study shows that after the 1940s, the Jewish community in Podilia changed. The Jews suffered from the Holocaust, which forever changed the social characteristics of the Jewish population of Podilia.

Active anti-Jewish policy during the postwar totalitarian regime, latent antisemitism during the “thaw,” and the authoritarian conservative regime in the USSR from 1964 to the mid 1980s, caused significant changes in the demographic processes of the Jewish population of the region. From the 1940s to the 1980s, the Jewish population of Podilia steadily decreased. The Jewish community before the end of the 1980s noticeably lost its influence in the region, but remained the largest ethnic community there, after Russians.     

Jewish studies underground in Leningrad in the 1980s†

ABSTRACT

This article is a first-hand report of a participant and leader of a number of underground initiatives within the “refuseniks’” community which aimed to encourage Jewish studies. These underground initiatives involved seminars (scholarly as well as public), excursions through Jewish historical sites, and the publication of a samizdat journal. In short, these initiatives sought to recover and disseminate knowledge of Jewish history and culture.     

Between two worlds: late Soviet Jews in Leningrad

ABSTRACT

In this article, Ann Komaromi reads late Soviet Jewish culture in Leningrad in terms of the “two worlds” Jewish activists negotiated: official and unofficial, Soviet/Russian and Jewish, present and past, etc. While the public rhetoric of the struggle for Soviet Jewry suggested dramatic binaries of death and salvation that resonate with the eschatological extremes of the “Petersburg text,” Komaromi argues for a more prosaic approach to the imaginative and cultural project of reconstructing Jewish identity by people in this context. The article features the recollections of former Jewish activists taken from interviews and memoirs to reveal the range of endeavors in which they engaged, including Hebrew learning and teaching, seminars, demonstrations, Jewish soccer teams, local history walking tours, unofficial book collections, and ethnographic expeditions.     

Kvetching and carousing under Communism: old Odessa as the Soviet Union’s Jewish city of sin

Odessa has often been branded a “Jewish city.” Much like their counterparts in New York and Warsaw, Odessa’s Jews have historically played a fundamental role in the city’s demographic makeup, economic life and culture. But Odessa is unique among Jewish cities because it has been mythologised as a city of sin, a frontier seaport boomtown whose commercial prosperity and balmy climate attracted legions of adventurers, gangsters and swindlers seeking easy wealth and earthly pleasures. Old Odessa was the Russian Jew’s golden calf – gilded, wicked and ostentatious in its intemperance. Odessa’s carnivalesque environment was fertile ground for the blending of different cultures, and the Jews spearheaded this process, adopting a Yiddish‐inflected Russian as their language for celebrating their profligate city. By the 1917 Revolution the foundations had been laid for the emergence of Isaac Babel, Leonid Utesov, Mikhail Zhvanetskii and the many other Jews who subsequently left Odessa for Moscow and the Soviet interior. They would go on to disseminate the Odessa myth using literature, comedy and music, and their immense popularity ensured that Odessa was indelibly marked as a Jewish city of sin, inhabited by comical rogues whose colourful escapades were rooted in an idiom of Jewishness.     

Communication and medial frontier crossings in the Jewish underground culture

ABSTRACT

In this essay, the author examines Jewish art and literature in the context of the unofficial public sphere in the late Soviet Union. This Jewish cultural underground emerged within a specific communicative niche, which was the result of intensive private exchange, limited knowledge, and collectively discovered sources. The space in which artists and authors shared both their “work surface” and their coffee table, and in which the cultural production coincided with its own reception and analysis, constituted the cradle of very specific aesthetic features: particular forms of intertextual and intermedial links, self-reference, as well as a blend of the alternative lifeworld and art. Moreover, the close contact with “non-Jewish” artists in the same creative and often physical space brought about a synthetic form of culture. However, unlike with the Jewish vanguard artists of the first third of the twentieth century (such as the famous Kultur-lige), this synthesis was also caused by the largely non-Jewish socialization of “new Jews” in the late Soviet Union. This paper will focus on the following questions: How did the communicative context – the partial ban on Jewish topics and the alternative, semi-private public sphere of the Jewish unofficial culture in the late Soviet era – come about, and how did these aspects influence its artifacts?     

The literary development of Yekhiel Shraybman: a Jewish writer in Soviet clothing

This article examines the literary career of the last Bessarabian Yiddish writer of his generation Yekhiel Shraybman (1913–2005). His loss is still deeply felt by the Moldovan Jewish community as his life and writings embraced the country’s historic Jewish past. As his literary career was launched and developed in the Soviet Union his work, aesthetics and politics were affected by “Sovietisation,” a requirement of the Communist Party’s standards in relation to literature. Yet behind the ambivalent glamour of the title “Soviet writer,” he managed to remain a Jewish writer and leave behind a printed memory of his home shtetl, Rashkov.     

The post-Soviet “Orient” in stories by Vladimir Makanin and Liudmila Petrushevskaia

This article analyzes a paradoxical feature in post-Soviet Russian literature and film, where an anti-imperial message coexists with colonial tropes. It focuses on two short stories: “Slabye kosti” (“Weak Bones,” 1988) by Liudmila Petrushevskaia and “Kavkazskii plennyi” (“Prisoner of the Caucasus,” 1995) by Vladimir Makanin. Set respectively in Central Asia and the Caucasus, these stories reflect on the troubled Russian and Soviet relationship with these regions. Despite their artistic complexity and anti-imperial messages, these works are trapped by the literary tropes and cultural stereotypes of the past. These stories relate to a broader cultural trend characteristic of post-Soviet Russian culture. On the one hand, Russian culture has remained unreceptive to post-colonial discourses adopted by Western intellectuals. On the other hand, the resurgence of imperial preoccupations in contemporary Russia, as well as the anxiety surrounding Russia’s territorial integrity, preclude the development of Russia’s own discourses on ethnically distinct peripheries and identities. As a result of this discursive silence, even nuanced writers, such as Makanin and Petrushevskaia, rely on the traditional models of representing the Caucasus and Central Asia.     

The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow: Judaism for the masses

In 2012, a new Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center opened in Moscow – an event unthinkable during the Soviet regime. Financed at the level of $50 million, created by an international crew of academics and museum designers, and located in a landmark building, the museum immediately rose to a position of cultural prominence in the Russian museum scene. Using interactive technology and multimedia, the museum's core exhibition presents several centuries of complex local Jewish history, including the Second World War period. Naturally, the Holocaust is an important part of the story. Olga Gershenson's essay analyzes the museum's relationship to Holocaust history and memory in the post-Soviet context. She describes the museum's struggle to reconcile a Soviet understanding of the “Great Patriotic War” with a dominant Western narrative of the Holocaust, while also bringing the Holocaust in the Soviet Union to a broader audience via the museum. Through recorded testimonies, period documents, and film, the museum's display narrates the events of the Holocaust on Soviet soil. This is a significant revision of the Soviet-era discourse, which universalized and externalized the Holocaust. But this important revision is limited by the museum's choice to avoid the subject of local collaborators and bystanders. The museum shies away from the most pernicious aspect of the Holocaust history on Soviet soil, missing an opportunity to take historic responsibility and confront the difficult past.     

Sir Moses Montefiore's 1846 visit to Vil'na and its reflection in local maskilic literature

This article discusses the 1846 visit of the leading Anglo-Jewish figure Sir Moses Montefiore to Vil'na in the Russian Empire. Invited by leading figures of the city's Jewish community, Montefiore had a broader agenda at hand – the investigation of Jewish education in the empire. The visit had a profound and enduring effect on the Jews of Vil'na. This was reflected in the varying literary responses, especially among the city's maskilim. It forms the central theme of this article.     

A teacher and his students: child Holocaust testimonies from early postwar Polish Bytom

ABSTRACT

The document presented here was created in 1945 in Bytom, Poland. It contains testimonies by Holocaust survivor children collected and put down in a notebook by their survivor teacher, Shlomo Tsam, in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. The testimonies shed light on Jewish children's experience in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust, describing oppression, flight, and survival in the words of the weakest segment of Jewish communities – children. The testimonies provide raw data on the encounters between Jews and non-Jews in the territories in which the “Final Solution” was carried out. It is thus an important source contributing to the burgeoning research on the involvement of local populations in the murder of the Jews, on one hand, and in saving Jews, on the other. The creation of this document, one of several collections of Jewish survivor children's testimonies produced in the immediate postwar years, is also indicative of post-Holocaust Jewish sensibilities and concerns regarding surviving children.     

Juggling Models of Masculinity: Russian-Jewish Immigrants in the Israeli Army

The present study addresses the question “What is masculinity?” by exploring how male immigrants interpret local masculinity and the models of masculinity they portray while situating themselves in the male hierarchy of the new society. The study is based on “immigration stories” elicited by in‐depth interviews conducted with 43 university students who immigrated to Israel at the beginning of the 1990s from the former Soviet Union. The analysis of the stories reveals that the immigrants employ four major practices (avoidance, mockery, maneuvering, and provocation) that unfasten the takenfor‐granted link between masculinity and army service in the Israeli society, thereby resisting the hegemonic, military model of masculinity in Israel. The immigrants render meaning to their resistance of the indigenous model (“The Warrior”) via the harnessing of cultural models that they carry with them from their native home—“The Russian Soldier” and “The Jewish Man”—without seeking to alter gender power relations as such. They discursively juggle between the three contesting and competing models of masculinity that together constitute a fluid and elusive “interpretative field” of masculinity. Via their interpretative work, the Russian male immigrants reconstitute their masculine identity, seeking to assert their distinctiveness and to receive social legitimation for their different conception of masculinity.