1929 by Hasia R. Diner & Gennady Estraikh

Author:Hasia R. Diner & Gennady Estraikh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2013-07-07T16:00:00+00:00

Conclusion: Looking Back on 1929

In May 1943, the ICOR published an Almanac that included an article by Ab. Epstein on the history and goals of the ICOR. He detailed the immense amount of help the ICOR had provided to the settlers in Birobidzhan over the years. The 1929 Experts Commission, in particular, had convinced many Jews in the United States that Birobidzhan was a viable enterprise.33 Charles Kuntz, in the same publication, wrote that Birobidzhan was being celebrated because it was the “grand offspring” of a revolution that had “brought peace and goodwill to One Sixth of the earth” and had “rebuilt society on the solid foundation of socialist economy which precludes exploitation of man by man and oppression of nation by nation.” To acknowledge Birobidzhan during this time of war was to commemorate the grandiose achievements of the Soviet Union, “the universally acknowledged bulwark of historic progress.”34

The ICOR held its last national convention in March 1946, before it merged with the American Committee for the Settlement of Jews in Birobidjan (Ambijan); the combined organization would be known as the American Birobidjan Committee until its demise in 1951. Abraham Jenofsky, the last national secretary, told the ICOR delegates that the time had come to create a united organization to consolidate the strength of the movement and to attract the widest array of Jewish members and supporters, to take part in the work on behalf of Birobidzhan and to help those who had suffered in the war.

It was now eighteen years since Birobidzhan had been designated an area for Jewish colonization, “a date which should and will become marked in the history of Jews as the beginning of a new epoch in the life of a great portion of our people.” Soviet nationality policy had made Jews fully equal with the other people of the Soviet Union. Birobidzhan would assume great importance in postwar plans for the development of the Far East.35

But a mere decade later, when Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” at the twentieth congress of the Soviet Communist Party exposed Stalin and his henchmen as mass murderers, it had also become obvious that the Birobidzhan project had proved a failure, if not indeed a hoax. But by then, Ambijan had collapsed, and few people could—or would—recall the glory days of the ICOR in 1929.

Why did the Experts Commission return with such a positive report regarding Birobidzhan’s potential? Clearly, given the members’ political attitudes toward Jewish colonization and their pro-Soviet sympathies, they interpreted what they saw and heard in the most favorable manner possible. This was their implicit mandate. After all, the Soviet authorities hoped their report would induce American Jewish organizations to raise money on behalf of Soviet Jewry. And settlement of the region by Jews loyal and devoted to the Soviet regime would safeguard the area from land-hungry Chinese peasants and from the designs of Japanese imperialists.

As well, the ICOR needed, very quickly, to counter the unfavorable publicity generated by events in Palestine that year. Pogroms took place in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Safed, Hebron, and a number of smaller locales in the British Mandate.

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