IGOR - Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia - page 158

national homeland for Soviet Jewry with Yiddish as the official language. But less than 10
years after the creation of the Jewish Autonomous Region, Stalin began to crack down on
Jewish culture. The government head was executed, Yiddish books were burnt, and Jewish
schools and the synagogue closed down.”
Once Israel was created, many Soviet Jews fled there, and the Jewish population of
Birobidzhan became all but nonexistent, making the name of the region almost laughable.
But today, still, when you arrive at the train station in Birobidzhan, the first thing you
notice is a gigantic menorah outside. And, a few blocks away, a statue commemorating the
play Fiddler on the Roof . There are several synagogues in town, and the leaders swear that
the region's Jewish population is slowly growing today.
We stop by one synagogue, and sit down with the young rabbi, Eli Riss. He's Russian-
born, but spent some years in the United States, in an orthodox congregation in Brooklyn.
He returned to Birobidzhan and feels he is serving a population of not just Jews.
“There was an older guy in town who started coming by recently,” Riss says, as we sip
tea together in the meeting-and-activities room of the synagogue. “He said, 'Well. I live in
Birobidzhan. So I should think like I'm Jewish.”
So I should think like I'm Jewish.
Inna, on that train platform, felt nothing holding Russians together. Igor, with his T-shirt,
felt part of a generation that has no control. And this man, clinging to whatever identity is
locally available. What a sense of emptiness, of wandering.