By Jake MO and Tyler NY.
On October 5th 2024, the United Jewish Peoples Fraternal Order (UJPFO) rang in Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) of year 5785 with the Jewish Peoples Schule class on the Jewish Autonomous Region and Birobidzhan in present-day Far East Russia. Rosh Hashanah is simultaneously a time for rejoice of the new and upcoming while also reflecting on the hardship of the past. In keeping with this tradition, the Jewish Peoples Schule based its theme of out with the old: economic exploitation, anti-semitism, and segregation and in with the new: progressive fraternity, economic equality, and cultural development.
After an introduction of Rosh Hashanah, the class began with a discussion of the reactionary Czarist era from 1791 to 1917. This period of time was characterized by attacks on the Jewish and other ethnic minorities known as pogroms which targeted hundreds of communities, instigated mass murders and injuries, and caused wholesale destruction and displacement of shtetls (villages). To make this familiar, the class presented scenes from the famous movie, The Fiddler on the Roof (1971) by progressive author Sholem Aleichem.
Then the class moved to the monumental creation of the Jewish Autonomous Region and Birobidzhan. The Bolsheviks, after liberating Russia and its colonies from the repressive Czarist regime and the subsequent imperialist bourgeois Kerensky government, saw the need for each national group that existed in the former Czar’s “prison house of nations” to have their own cultural and language entity within the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Both Stalin and Lenin conceived of the idea of a Jewish Autonomous Republic with set borders.
The presentation concluded with the discussion of the progressive history of the Jewish Autonomous Region and its capital, Birobidzhan. The creation of the Jewish Autonomous Region has made it possible for the Jews to have a national home which they can go to at any time or leave as they desire. This national home institutionalized Yiddish culture and language while living harmoniously with its other national groups such as the Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, and Chinese. As the Soviet author, Avtandil Rukhadze, wrote in his book, Jews in the USSR, “people of many nationalities are living and working together there as a close-knit family.”
Reflecting on the past year of genocidal violence in the Gaza Strip of Palestine as well as the broader war in the Middle East, the Jewish Autonomous Region serves as proof that the Jewish people can have a homeland without being guided by reactionary Zionist ideology, racism, and imperialism. The Jewish Autonomous Region demonstrated that socialism is the key to solving the oppression of all nationalities including the Jewish people.