Jewish Autonomous Oblast

From time to time I air the idea that it might have been a good idea to have given the Jews what was until fairly recently the GDR (aka East Germany) as their homeland after the second world war. This would have enabled survivors to stay rather nearer their original homes than going off to an uncertain welcome in the Middle East.

Of no help now, but at the time, had Stalin been willing, which seems rather unlikely, it could have been a runner. All the people living there at the time who were not Jews would have been invited to leave - and given that, at that time, there were some very large population movements going on, this would have just been one more.

I had known about a couple of colonial schemes that really had been promoted over the years - Uganda and Madagascar - but I had forgotten, if I ever knew, about the Soviet venture in the far east, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast on the Amur River. For a short while in the 1920's, the idea was kill various birds with one stone, one bird being a homeland for the Jews and another bird being the need to populate, to beef up this thinly populated border land with China against the threat of incursions or land grabs by either the Chinese or the Japanese.

One problem was the rather harsh climate: cold in the winter, hot in the summer and lots of mosquitoes. All of which sounds a bit like Winnipeg in Canada.

More serious were the unpleasant, not to say savage, twists and turns of Soviet policy, with the result that while the place still exists - at least according to wikipedia at reference 1 - very few Jews now live there, although the monument included above continues to dominate the main square in the capital, Birobidzhan.

All this being brought to my attention by the NYRB.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Autonomous_Oblast.