Jerusalem on the Amur: Birobidzhan and the Canadian Jewish Communist Movement, 1924–1951 (review)

In 1945 the small Winnipeg Jewish community raised thousands of dollars to send to Poland and Russia to help fellow Jews ravaged by the war and to resettle war orphans in Birobidzhan. A souvenir book called Dos Goldene Bukh (The Golden Book) composed of messages from members of the community conveys the widespread support for the Soviet Union in this period (158). The contributions are heartrending, and many honour the Red Army troops for their bravery and for saving civilization, and they express the hope that ‘we remain allies and friends in peace as in war.’ Included are many personal requests written in Yiddish, Russian, and English. Would Sam Lipshitz, as part of the first Canadian Jewish Congress delegation to postwar Poland and the ussr, find out what happened to a brother, a sister, a mother-in-law, a cousin who was a shoemaker, a tailor, etc., and lived in this particular shtetl? The front of the book is signed by the mayor of Winnipeg and the premier of Manitoba who express thanks for the ‘unexcelled valour of the Russian Soldiers and people’ (279 n58).

Jerusalem on the Amur is the story of Yidishe Kolonizatsye Organizatye in Rusland (icor), the organization set up in 1925 to support Jewish colonization in the Soviet Union. After 1928, the original efforts to settle Jews in the Crimea moved to Birobidzhan in the east, a part of Soviet Asia where a Jewish autonomous republic was to be established. In 1931 the Canadian branches established a separate organization, which later in the 1930s shifted efforts to anti-fascist activities, refocusing on Birobidzhan only as the war drew to an end.

Srebrnik frames his book as a ‘cautionary tale’ of the Jewish Communist movement, the ‘story of people who accepted as truth the lies and fantasies spun by cynical propagandists’ (xvii). While many leaders were members of the Communist Party, much of the membership came from the broader Jewish community, excited by the idea of support for a Jewish homeland. Birobidzhan, with the exception of the 1928–33 period, was proposed as complementary to rather than a rival of Jewish settlement in Palestine. The roster of founders and supporters of icor is a ‘who’s who’ of prominent Jewish leftists and Jewish Communist party activists and writers of the 1920s. Abraham Reisin, for example, described the icor program as ‘the Zionism of the intelligent’ (27), and Albert Einstein sent greetings praising the efforts of the Canadian Committee (190).

Srebrnik, however, refers to icor as a Communist ‘front’ group conflating Communist Party membership with the broader-based groups who saw the ussr as promoting Jewish interests. Favourable first-hand reports seemed to confirm this view. Melekh Epstein – who, in 1959, in the midst of the Cold War, wrote that Birobizhan was ‘doomed to failure’ (177) and ‘the entire project was forced upon the Jewish Communists’ – seems to have forgotten about the three weeks when he visited there in 1930 and reported that he had seen so many wonderful things he could ‘barely catch his breath’ (52). Others, including Gina Medem, Reuben Brainin, the prominent Zionist, and Winnipegers Ben Victor and his wife Rose, also travelled to Birobidzhan and returned to become icor activists.

The conclusion describes the tragic ending to this dream of the Soviet Union as a place of safety for Jews with the murder of Shloime Mikhoels in 1948, and the elimination of the Soviet Jewish writers and intellectuals in the early 1950s. Birobidzhan was no longer mentioned in the press, the Yiddish schools were closed while the Cold War threatened the livelihood and freedom to travel of anyone associated with the left in North America.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, particularly when looking at Communist-led Jewish movements of the first half of the last century. Srebrnik quotes scholars such as Ezra Mendelson who dismiss organizations such as icor as ‘halfway houses,’ thus positioning...