Bubbe's Place: Stories

Birobidzhan

I sent all my children to high schools out of the neighborhood. I wanted them to meet and know teens that were white, brown, black, Asian, Slavic, etc. I wanted them to know that the world was not created in their image and that was O.K.

I did not join or contribute to organizations that excluded others because of their race, color, religion, or sexual orientation. I wrote letters to my representatives when I saw things that were unjust or un-American. I did nothing big or brave, but I didn't ignore things either. I hope you will do the same.

Let me begin this section with a very brief recent history of the Jews in Russia/ USSR. In the late eighteen eighties and early nineteen hundreds the Russian Tsars encouraged vicious, deadly anti-Semitic pogroms. One result was that many Jews immigrated to the United States. Of the Jews who remained in Russia, many were attracted to the Russian revolutionary movement. They hoped to see an end to the tsars and the building of a modern just society. The revolution ended the rule of the Romanov Tsars in 1917. Between 1921 and 1925, eight hundred synagogues were closed. At the same time the government closed Jewish schools and eliminated the teaching of the Jewish language, Yiddish. (My father escaped illegally from Russia in 1922. My mother emigrated legally in 1923.) The government offered the Jews an opportunity to establish a Jewish state in Birobidzhan on the border of Manchuria. This was not well received in the Jewish community and failed to attract Jewish people. In 1927 Joseph Stalin became the supreme leader of the USSR. Stalin said about the Jews, "They are the only group that is completely inassimilable. I can't swallow them. I can't spit them out." In the nineteen thirties Stalin sought to promote atheism and closed the synagogues. During W.W.II, Hitler invaded the USSR and with the help of Latvians and Ukrainians murdered the Jews.