New Exodus Reflects a Dying Experiment : Israel: Soviet Jews from the Stalin-created ‘autonomous region’ in Siberia are trickling in. It’s called a salvation for Zionism.

It’s a long way from Birobidjian to Jerusalem, a journey of 10,000 miles and one that crosses between rival solutions to what was once delicately called the Jewish Problem.

Birobidjian is known for its voracious mosquitoes and an attempt by dictator Josef Stalin to design a national home for Jews in the Soviet Union.

By all accounts, the mosquitoes remain as hungry as ever, but Birobidjian’s Jewish inhabitants, driven by fear of ethnic conflict, have begun to leave for Israel.

The number of refugees who have come from Birobidjian is small--only 400.

But the exodus carries a heavy symbolic weight, a reflection of a dying experiment in distant Siberia and the pre-eminence of another in the eastern Mediterranean.

Meanwhile, the influx from the Soviet Union is taking on epic proportions. Since January, 1990, Israel has received the highest number of immigrants in one year since 1949--about 187,000 people, most of them Soviet Jews, the government said Monday. Officials added that they expect the year’s tally to reach 200,000 by Dec. 31. A million could come within three years.

One family of immigrants from Birobidjian gave a flatly emphatic answer as to why.

“There was nothing left for us in Birobidjian. So, we thought we would try Israel,” said Haim Brenner, 36, a construction engineer and native of the far region that is twice Israel’s size.

Brenner, with his wife, Ahdova, and two daughters, were among the first Soviet Jews to leave Birobidjian for Israel. Both worked as construction engineers and both viewed with dismay the decline in building resulting from the Soviet Union’s vast economic and political problems.

In their perception of the dangers of a collapsing Soviet Union, they echo the tens of thousands of other Soviet Jews who have fled for both Israel and the United States.

The Brenners never considered coming to Israel until last year, when the first of a string of Zionist missionaries came by to preach the virtues of Israel and counter the deep impact of years of anti-Israeli propaganda.

“We had only heard bad things about Israel for all our lives,” said Ahdova Brenner.

Israeli officials look upon the Soviet influx as a kind of salvation for Zionism, which is based on the hypothesis that Jews are destined to settle in the land of their ancient forebears. Following years of stalled immigration, in which an infusion of newcomers from Ethiopia was countered by a steady outward flow of emigrants, the Soviet arrivals came as a transfusion for a sickly patient.

Conversely, the departures from Birobidjian, however few, highlight the failure of a project that some say was doomed from the beginning.

Birobidjian, officially called the Jewish Autonomous Region, sits near the border with China, across the Amur River from Manchuria. Stalin chose the location less for how it would serve to protect Jewish society from anti-Semitic outbursts in the Soviet Union than how it might benefit his empire’s defenses in the sparsely settled Far East.

Some Jewish citizens and Communist party officials lobbied for a more hospitable location--the Crimea, for instance--but even as disease drove half of the first trickle of migrants away, Mosocw insisted that Birobidjian be the Jewish home.

“The Jewish people now face the great task of preserving its nationality,” said Mikhail Kalinin, then the nominal head of state. “Within a decade, Birobidjian will be the most important and probably the only bulwark of national Jewish socialist culture.”

For a while, the dream held some luster. About 20,000 Jews from the Soviet Union, joined by a smattering from abroad, including British-held Palestine where Zionists were busy trying to establish farming settlements, settled in Birobidjian.

One pioneer, Hannah Goldstein, now 84 and interviewed in Birobidjian by the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, recalled: “There was a great deal of excitement. We built the foundation of a Jewish state built on equality. There wasn’t much food . . . but a lot of fish in the river.”

In a rush of national and cultural fervor, Yiddish along with Russian was adopted as the official language, a Yiddish newspaper was published and a library of Jewish literature built and named for Sholem Aleichem, the Ukrainian teller of Yiddish tales. Yiddish was viewed as preferable to Hebrew, the language promoted by Zionists.

Jewish farmers set up collectives and Jews took up key official village and town posts.

Early enthusiasm was sunk not just by the legendary cold, nor the difficult marshland farming, nor the preposterously distant geography, but rather by Stalin’s cruel political purges which decimated the region’s leadership and drove many Jews back to their former homes.

World War II further blocked development, although in the war’s aftermath, poverty and dislocations in the Soviet west pushed refugees to Birobidjian.

One of them was Ahdova Brenner’s father, Leonid Katzman, who after the war returned to his ruined home and fields in the Crimea under Ukrainian occupation. Rather than do battle in a desperate situation, he fled for the Jewish homeland.

“They told us it was paradise on earth. Propaganda, of course, but we went anyway,” said Katzman, who with his wife Rosa came to Israel with his daughter and son-in-law.

The reality was a town of two stone buildings and a few shacks built on ground so marshy that people had to walk on wooden runways to get around. “Swamp, swamp, swamp, swamp,” is the way Katzman, 65, remembers it.

Haim Brenner’s parents made a similar postwar odyssey.

“When they came, there were no warm clothes, no beds,” recounted Haim. “They used to sleep wrapped in newspapers.”

The Jewish population of Birobidjian surged to 30,000 and in Soviet official lore, settlement took on heroic dimensions. “There are also burning enthusiasts, ready to give up everything to live there . . . among them a former Palestinian patriot (who) although in his 50s, hustles about during the day and is sleepless at night hoping to see his new enterprise come true,” a Soviet Jewish author wrote.

But another purge crushed the new seeds of Soviet Jewish nationalism: Writers were sent to jail, the Jewish theater in Birobidjian was closed, Yiddish was dropped from school curricula, and books were officially removed from the Sholem Aleichem Library. Just about all that was left of the region’s Jewish character were the stamps in the residents’ passports that said “Jew” and the Yiddish newspaper that printed the latest Communist Party directives.

“Their idea of a synagogue was to paste the sign ‘Synagogue’ on an empty building,” said Katzman, a former accountant. “When one burned down, they put the sign on another one. It was for tourists to see and say, ‘Look, they’ve got a synagogue.’ ”

Relative stability after Stalin’s death failed to revive Birobidjian. Gone were the burning enthusiasts. In 1958, Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, admitted in an interview that Birobidjian was a failure, but he blamed the fiasco on a supposed Jewish dislike for collective labor.

The Jewish population eventually shrunk to a tiny minority, 4%, of the region’s population of 100,000. The lone synagogue was in shambles and shared between an occasional Jewish worshiper and a Christian sect that celebrated the Sabbath. Still, top Communist Party and administrative posts were left in Jewish hands and the place was nominally reserved for Jewish settlement.

“We didn’t know anything about Jewish rituals or holidays; there were no circumcisions. We were Jewish by nationality but nothing else,” remembered Ahdova Brenner, 33.

The word Israel was taboo, reflecting the heated rivalry between the Zionist idea of establishing a permanently separate state and the Marxist view that regions and republics of whatever nationality would eventually merge into a nation of workers.

During the years of Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev, high school students were encouraged to inform on anyone expressing an interest in Israel, the Brenners said. Once Ahdova Brenner asked about the chances for learning Hebrew and a teacher retorted, “Why Hebrew? Why not Yiddish?”

The repressive atmosphere changed somewhat with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s decision to ease emigration for Soviet Jews. At first, most Jews fled for the United States. But under home pressures to curb refugee traffic and appeals from Israel not to lure Jewish migrants away from Israel, the Bush Administration limited Soviet Jewish influx to 50,000 a year.

The limit coincided with brush-fire fears that a wave of anti-Semitism, pushed by nationalist unrest, would sweep the Soviet Union, In the Russian Republic, Jews were threatened by anti-Semitic eruptions. In non-Russian republics where dormant nationalisms have come alive, Jews were resented not only as Jews, but lumped with other groups as outsiders and told to go. The result: a mountain of applications to migrate to Israel.

Neither anti-Semitism nor ultra-nationalism seem to have infected faraway Birobidjian, with its mixed population of Russians and central Asians. Still, rumor of unrest elsewhere was enough to spur some anxiety among the Jews there.

“We figured that if it was happening in Leningrad and Moscow, it would eventually happen here,” said Haim Brenner.

Information on Israel began to trickle in. Officials from the Jewish Agency and other immigrant promotion groups began to fan out in the Soviet Union to encourage Jews to go to Israel. At a meeting in Birobidjian during Passover, hundreds of questioners at two meetings peppered an Israeli delegate with their doubts.

Is there work? Housing? Will we get skin cancer from the sun? Can you drink the water?

Some voiced worry over the conflict with the Palestinians and were answered with the evasive perspective that the conflict had been going on for 40 years.

One Israeli praised the virtues of living on settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but said that the newcomers would have to make up their own minds.

A concern much on the minds of the potential migrants was whether they and their families would be considered Jewish enough to fit into Israeli society. Many Jews and non-Jews had intermarried. What would be the status of the spouses and children? Reports of opposition to letting in Jews of mixed heritage intensified the worries, as did stories of difficulties in conversion.

“I tried to tell them there would be no split families. That fitting-in depended mostly on learning Hebrew,” said Yair Plessar, a biologist who volunteered to travel to Birobidjian and hold the Passover seminar. “I don’t think they left completely satisfied.”

The Birobidjian government tried to counter the Israeli pitch with the argument that Israel is not so great. One party official traveled to Israel at Israeli government expense on a “friendship” trip and returned home to write a scathing article in the local paper describing Israel as a mess. Katzman was described as missing Birobidjian so much, he “spits” on Israel, while Haim Brenner was reported to be reduced to begging to get by.

“Forget glasnost. They still tell lies,” was Katzman’s response.

Katzman said he believes Jewish officials in Birobidjian oppose emigration because if all the Jews leave, they will lose their posts. The Brenners claim that Soviet citizens who once had their Jewish identity changed to Russian on their identification cards are trying to have former identities reinstated.

The Brenners settled contentedly in a small apartment on Jerusalem’s south side, replete with comforts hard to come by in the Soviet Union: a color television and a full refrigerator. Their rent and expenses for the first year are paid by the government.

They had made the trip from the Soviet Union last spring, a five-day journey that included an 18-hour plane flight from Birobidjian to Moscow, a layover in Budapest and a final flight to Tel Aviv.

Their command of Hebrew has progressed rapidly, but the Brenners have been unable to find jobs equal to their training. In the meantime, they are painting houses part-time.

Despite having set foot on two clear landscapes of the Jewish dream of nationhood, the family as a whole is somewhat ambivalent about the deeper meaning of their journey. Ahdova takes a philosophical line:

“Israel is the only place for the Jews,” she states flatly.

Her father’s reasoning, by way of contrast, was highly personal.

“My child came, so I came,” he said.