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" The question everyone asked me before I went to Birobidzhan and after I returned was: Are there any Jews in the Jewish Autonomous Region? I posed it to Valery Gurevich, the deputy governor responsible for everything Jewish in the region, from the children's song-and-dance ensemble to the statues of imaginary shtetl figures all over the city - a series of illustrations to Sholem Aleichem stories cast in bronze. I felt ridiculous asking a Jew in Birobidzhan if there were Jews in Birobidzhan, but was a master at answering this question. His answer was "Well . . ."
He tried to avoid giving me any figures at all - I had to fill them in later - but the gist of his story was this: Before the Soviet Union collapsed, the census placed the percentage of Jews in the Jewish Autonomous Region at a bit over four, which was about four times the percentage of Jews in the general population of the Soviet Union. In absolute figures, that was about nine thousand Jews. But these figures were based on answers people gave to the census taker, an official, in a country where if one had a choice (for example, if one of one's parents was not Jewish), one did not choose to call oneself Jewish. Just ten years before the last Soviet census, the percentage of Jews in the region's population had been three times higher - suggesting that it had been diluted by intermarriage but the number of people who had some Jewish roots was a lot higher than the official nine thousand.
So it should come as no surprise that the number of people who emigrated to Israel when this became possible, at the turn of the 1990s, far exceeded the official number of Jews in Birobidzhan. And there were still some Jews left - a couple thousand, give or take as many.
Of them, roughly five people - including Iosif Bekerman, Maria Rak, and Valery Gurevich - were engaged on an ongoing basis with Jewish culture. Of them, only one - Bekerman - spoke Yiddish. There were no Yiddish writers left in the Jewish Autonomous Region. "
― Masha Gessen , Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region
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" Being an engaged citizen of Trump’s America means living in a constant state of cognitive tension. One cannot put the president and his lies out of one’s mind, because he is the president. Accepting that the president continuously tweets or says things that are not true, are known not to be true, are intended to be heard or read as power lies, and will continue to be broadcast—on Twitter and by the media—after they have been repeatedly disproven means accepting a constant challenge to fact-based reality. In effect, it means that the two realities—Trumpian and fact-based—come to exist side by side, on equal ground. The tension is draining. The need to pay constant attention to the lies is exhausting, and it is compounded by the feeling of helplessness in the face of the ridiculous and repeated lies. Most Americans in the age of Trump are not, like the subjects of a totalitarian regime, subjected to state terror. But even before the coronavirus, they were subjected to constant, sometimes debilitating anxiety. One way out of that anxiety is to relieve the mind of stress by accepting Trumpian reality. Another—and this too is an option often exercised by people living under totalitarianism—is to stop paying attention, disengage, and retreat to one’s private sphere. Both approaches are victories for Trump in his attack on politics. "
― Masha Gessen , Surviving Autocracy
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" A synagogue had been established in Birobidzhan in 1929, a small wooden building constructed by some of the first settlers. Twenty years later, everyone who attended the Rosh Hashanah services was arrested; the rabbi was sentenced to death. Jews returned to the wooden building in the late 1950s, but with the end of Khrushchev's Thaw, gathering there became too risky again and services moved to private apartments. In the 1970s, when the air in the Soviet Union once more grew a bit lighter, services at the synagogue resumed. But the last of the occasionally observant Jews were old, and by the mid-1980s a minyan - a quorum of ten Jewish adults - became impossible. The wooden building was repurposed. There was no synagogue in the Jewish Autonomous Region for the next twenty years - until American Jews had given enough money to erect two small stone buildings on Lenin Street, one for the synagogue and one for the Freud Jewish community center, both protected by a single metal fence. "
― Masha Gessen , Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region
