In Soviet Jewish Zone, Time Is Right to Leave--or Stay : Religion: Just as a new openness has revived tradition in the region created by Stalin, emigration is diluting it.

At a recent concert in this industrial city in the Soviet Far East, the audience clapped and stomped their feet as a portly American danced on stage and sang a rendition of the soul music hit “I Feel Good” in Yiddish.

Holding a “Festival of Jewish Culture” just 40 miles from the Chinese frontier may at first seem unusual, but not to the leadership of Birobidzhan, the capital of the Soviet Union’s remote Jewish Autonomous Region. The special zone was founded in the 1930s as an alternative Jewish homeland to the fledgling country then being built in Palestine.

Today, more than 50 years later, signs in Birobidzhan are in a mixture of Yiddish and Russian. The main street is named after the Jewish writer Sholom Aleichem. And the restaurant at the Hotel Vostok still serves up tasty potato knishes and other mainstays of Jewish cuisine.

All that is really missing are the Jews.

“Almost all my friends have left,” said Elizabeta Godun, 63, the coat checker at the city’s tiny museum, who arrived here in 1937. “When I walk down the street, I don’t see anyone I know. I think Jewish life is disappearing from this place.”

According to Vladimir Belinker, the editor of the local Yiddish newspaper, Birobidzhan Shtern, more than 1,000 people have left for Israel in the last year or so, leaving the official Jewish population between 8,000 and 9,000. This comes to just 4% of the Jewish Autonomous Region’s total population of 220,000.

It is little consolation to Birobidzhan that the rest of the Soviet Union has experienced an equally high rate of Jewish emigration since President Mikhail S. Gorbachev took power. Since 1988, it is estimated that 250,000 Soviet Jews have left the country.

“We need to be realistic and realize that many people are going to Israel because they want to have more material benefits,” said Mark M. Kaufman, a Jew who is the chairman of the local government. “It’s no secret that the standard of living in Israel is a lot higher than here.”

Paradoxically, the wave of Jewish emigration is taking place at a time when Jewish culture is enjoying an unprecedented renaissance in the region as part of Gorbachev’s relaxation of religious suppression.

Under a crackdown that began in 1948, all Jewish schools had been closed in Birobidzhan, and it became illegal to teach Yiddish or Jewish traditions.

But in the last two years, a local teachers’ college has begun offering Yiddish as an elective course, and it has proved an unexpected hit, even among some non-Jewish students.

A Jewish school was opened recently to teach children the fundamentals of their religion, and the local museum now devotes two large displays to the Soviet government’s repression of Jews in the 1930s and 1940s.

“Three years ago nobody knew about Jewish culture; we only knew we were Jewish by looking at the entry in our passports,” said Nikolai Borodulin, head of the college’s Yiddish faculty, who taught himself the language from an old book.

Avram Goldmacher, a writer at the newspaper, said that only about half the staff at the paper still understands Yiddish. “Step by step, we’re bringing back the culture,” he said.

There is still no rabbi in the entire region. The only synagogue is in a log cabin on the outskirts of town. Although the synagogue has recently been crowded on holy days, it is normally empty on the Sabbath.

“There is only one old man who can read the Torah in Hebrew,” Borodulin said. “This region was founded by Jewish Communists, not by Jewish believers.”

Young people are expressing a growing interest in learning about their religion, however, in part because the history and tradition remain shrouded in mystery.

Yakov Dekter, head of the Confederation of Jewish Organizations, said there is a dawning awareness on the part of the regions’ nonpracticing Jews that “there can be no Jewish culture without the Jewish religion.”

Many of the Jews in the region came here after famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s made life there impossible.

“Not all Jews wanted to go to Israel,” said Bernard Choseed, a visiting professor of Yiddish from Washington. “The idea was to build a Jewish republic in their own country. People came from as far away as America and Argentina to settle here.”

Despite the initial attraction of the idea of a Jewish state in the Soviet Far East, the climate proved harsher than most of the pioneers expected. Many Jews left after only a year in Birobidzhan.

“Stalin made a big mistake sending Jews to this climate,” said Belinker, the newspaper editor.

Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev once told an interviewer that he thought the Birobidzhan experiment failed because Jews were too individualistic and would not work together collectively.

Even at the height of Jewish migration to the region, the Jewish population never exceeded 30%.

Although most Jewish institutions were closed in the 1948 repressions, residents said the anti-Semitism common in the rest of the Soviet Union never took root here.

Kaufman, the head of the regional government, said the comeback of Jewish culture has closely paralleled the process of democratization in the country.

One sign of the current openness was the third annual festival of Jewish culture held earlier this month.

For the first time, foreign guests were invited to appear at the festival. Among the visitors was an Israeli singing group, accompanied on stage by two large Israeli flags.

A member of the Israeli troupe told the audience through an interpreter that the flags had come from Jerusalem.

Because of the ease of emigration to Israel, the region is reporting a sudden upsurge in the number of residents who are switching their official nationality, which is recorded on their passports, from Russian to “Jewish.”

Mixed marriages are fairly common, and under past regimes it was considered desirable to register children as Russian. Now that they want to leave, the children are having the registration changed to read “Jewish.”

The question of whether to emigrate provokes heated arguments wherever people gather, especially in the park where elderly people sit and take in the sun during mild autumn weather.

“I want to go to Israel, but my daughter won’t divorce her husband, who is Russian,” said Luba Lillenka, 62. “My granddaughter is in Israel and already owns a Japanese car.”

But Misha Becker, who arrived in 1932 to work for a Jewish collective farm, has no desire to leave. “I like it here and I don’t want to go away,” he said.

Godun, the museum worker, said she could not afford to move to Israel without governmental assistance in getting an apartment. “I have my son there,” Godun said. “He is very well off. But I don’t want to be an imposition.”