The original Jewish homeland

Zionists chose not to acknowledge Birobidjan, the voluntary Jewish homeland (supported by American Jewry since 1928) of the Jewish Autonomous Region (on the border of Russia and China).

To this day this is a flourishing Jewish homeland - a largely unsung region Lady Renouf makes public on both PRESS TV programmes, which can be viewed by clicking on the programme names:

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The reality, admitted even by Jewish sources such as the Encyclopedia Judaica, is that Birobidjan was a widely supported initiative to create a Jewish homeland, beginning in 1928 and formalised in 1934.

A large number of Jews took leading roles in the 1917 Russian Revolution, but while these were happy to submerge their Jewish identity into their Bolshevik identity, they recognised that there was a broader problem of how to deal with Russia's Jews.

The last thing the Bolshevik leaders wanted was for their new social experiment to be derailed by further outbreaks of the traditional hostility between Russians and Jews. So early plans to settle Jews in the Ukraine or Crimea were swiftly abandoned, due to adverse reactions from the existing local populations.

The region around Birobidjan by contrast was a large and virtually empty space, and an autonomous Jewish region was created amounting to 36,000 sq. km. This is almost the size of Switzerland (40,000 sq. km) and considerably larger in area than modern Israel (20,000 sq. km).

Far from Jews being forcibly exiled to Birobidjan, there were extensive worldwide efforts to promote this Soviet Jewish homeland project, including 'Ambidjan', the American Birobidjan Committee, whose officials included Albert Einstein and the prominent American Jewish author B.Z. Goldberg. More