147 The Jewish Autonomous Oblast

From the late 1920s, the Bolshevist response to Zionism was to allow Jews to settle West of Khabarovsk along the Amur at the Chinese border, in what was known as the Jewish Autonomous Area from 1934. Thousands of Jews went there and sent their children to schools where they learned Yiddish. On the photograph is a column of gymnasts in the capital Birobidzhan at a commemoration of the October revolution, possibly in 1935.

Jewish workers in Birobidžan
Ca 1935
Photograph, 25 x 19

Location