Meekandmild said
Not being at all as knowledgable nor as opiniated on this subject...
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Since I AM adequately opinionated on this subject
I'll take it upon myself to answer your question.
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Meekandmild asked:
From time to time I see a map of the former Soviet empire and 'way out in Siberia is a place called the Independant Jewish Republic or the Autonomous Jewish Republic or something of that nature. Is this REALLY a Jewish nation or is it just a highfalootin name like "The Commonwealth of Virginia"?
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This "independent" and "autonomous" Jewish Republic was Soviet double-speak to cover their continuation of the centuries-old Russian persecution of her Jews.
Another name for this area was Biribijahn (sp?) and was supposed to be an area set aside for the Jews to live in and enjoy untramelled their Jewish idendity and to be able to pass it on to their children (as it says in Torah and in the shema, the prayer repeated thrice daily by Jews who truly know who they are: "...and you shall teach it to your children....") -- sort of a substitute for Israel (then called Palestine).
This was peddled to the world to show the outside Jews and the world how "friendly" the Soviets were to the Jews.
Actually this area was as independent and autonomous as were the other Soviet-dominated and Soviet imprisoned "Republics" and it's independence and autonomy were enforced by Soviet tanks and by the KGB.
As you mentioned, the Soviets set aside an area in Siberia (!), the same frozen wasteland where they sent their other dissidents and political prisoners -- where they had situated the prison-camps of the Gulag.
Very few Jews were interested in Biribijahn, but it did serve as top-notch propaganda for use by left-wing and out-right Communist Jews in the West to point to in their fellow-travelling arguments for the Communist workers paradise. (Why there were and still are such Jews is a long but separate story.)
What was actually occuring in the Soviet Union was a brutal repression of Jews: not allowed to practise or teach their religion, not allowed to print books in -- or even teach -- Yiddish or Hebrew, almost all synagogues shut down, a few show-place synagogues, especially the big one in Moscow headed by a "Rabbi" in the pay of and under control by the KGB. The few Jews who attended were photographed and kept track of by the KGB.
And Stalin was busy purging Jews from their positions in the military, the government, industry, and Jewish writers, poet,s playwrights and artists.
He staged the infamous "doctors plot" where Jewish doctors were accused of planning to assassinate him (if only!) and many Jews were convicted in staged show-trials and executed or sent to Siberia.
And had Stalin not died in '53, he would have been able to carry out his planned exile of Jews to camps in Siberia where they would have been lucky to survive at all.
Jews managed to escape the worst of these perseccutions only by renouncing their Jewishness and living like the gentiles around them. The plan was to snuff out Jewish identity in one or a few generations. But even these Jews had the word "Jew" stamped on their internal passports, just in case.
And of course the Soviets armed the Arabs to the teeth and trained them and coached them in their "holy" Jihad against Israel.
If this :"Republic" was independent and autonomous, then I'm a (Jewish -- and I mean the monkey, too!) monkey's uncle.
matis
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