The Jewish Autonomous Oblast is a federal subject of Russia in the Russian Far East, bordering Khabarovsk Krai and Amur Oblast in Russia and Heilongjiang province in China. Its administrative center is the town of Birobidzhan.
The history of the Jews in Russia and areas historically connected with it goes back at least 1,500 years. Jews in Russia have historically constituted a large religious and ethnic diaspora; the Russian Empire at one time hosted the largest population of Jews in the world. Within these territories the primarily Ashkenazi Jewish communities of many different areas flourished and developed many of modern Judaism's most distinctive theological and cultural traditions, while also facing periods of anti-Semitic discriminatory policies and persecutions. Some have described a "renaissance" in the Jewish community inside Russia since the beginning of the 21st century; however, the Russian Jewish population has experienced precipitous decline since the end of the USSR which continues to this day, although it is still among the largest in Europe.
The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, abbreviated as JAC, was an organization that was created in the Soviet Union during World War II to influence international public opinion and organize political and material support for the Soviet fight against Nazi Germany, particularly from the West. It was organized by the Jewish Bund leaders Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter, upon an initiative of Soviet authorities, in fall 1941; both were released from prison in connection with their participation. Following their re-arrest, in December 1941, the Committee was reformed on Joseph Stalin's order in Kuibyshev in April 1942 with the official support of the Soviet authorities. In 1952, as part of the persecution of Jews in the last year part of Stalin's rule, most prominent members of the JAC were arrested on trumped-up spying charges, tortured, tried in secret proceedings, and executed in the basement of Lubyanka Prison. Stalin and elements of the KGB were worried about their influence and connections with the West. They were officially rehabilitated in 1988.
Crimean Tatars or Crimeans are a Turkic ethnic group and nation who are an indigenous people of Crimea. The formation and ethnogenesis of Crimean Tatars occurred during the 13th–17th centuries, uniting Cumans, who appeared in Crimea in the 10th century, with other peoples who had inhabited Crimea since ancient times and gradually underwent Tatarization, including Greeks, Italians, Armenians, Goths, Sarmatians, and others.
During the existence of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, different governments existed within the Crimean Peninsula. From 1921 to 1936, the government in the Crimean Peninsula was known as the Crimean Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic and was an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic located within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic; from 1936 to 1945, it was called the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.
The history of the Jews in Bessarabia, a historical region in Eastern Europe, dates back hundreds of years.
The Krymchaks are Jewish ethno-religious communities of Crimea derived from Turkic-speaking adherents of Rabbinic Judaism. They have historically lived in close proximity to the Crimean Karaites, who follow Karaite Judaism.
The history of the Jews in Ukraine dates back over a thousand years; Jewish communities have existed in the modern territory of Ukraine from the time of the Kievan Rus'. Important Jewish religious and cultural movements, from Hasidism to Zionism, arose there. According to the World Jewish Congress, the Jewish community in Ukraine constitutes Europe's third-largest and the world's fifth-largest.
The Crimea Germans were ethnic German settlers who were invited to settle in the Crimea as part of the East Colonization.
There were several proposals for a Jewish state in the course of Jewish history between the destruction of ancient Israel and the founding of the modern State of Israel. While some of those have come into existence, others were never implemented. The Jewish national homeland usually refers to the State of Israel or the Land of Israel, depending on political and religious beliefs. Jews and their supporters, as well as their detractors and anti-Semites have put forth plans for Jewish states.
The recorded history of the Crimean Peninsula, historically known as Tauris, Taurica, and the Tauric Chersonese, begins around the 5th century BCE when several Greek colonies were established along its coast, the most important of which was Chersonesos near modern day Sevastopol, with Scythians and Tauri in the hinterland to the north. The southern coast gradually consolidated into the Bosporan Kingdom which was annexed by Pontus and then became a client kingdom of Rome. The south coast remained Greek in culture for almost two thousand years including under Roman successor states, the Byzantine Empire, the Empire of Trebizond, and the independent Principality of Theodoro. In the 13th century, some Crimean port cities were controlled by the Venetians and by the Genovese, but the interior was much less stable, enduring a long series of conquests and invasions. In the medieval period, it was partially conquered by Kievan Rus' whose prince Vladimir the Great was baptised at Sevastopol, which marked the beginning of the Christianization of Kievan Rus'. During the Mongol invasion of Europe, the north and centre of Crimea fell to the Mongol Golden Horde, and in the 1440s the Crimean Khanate formed out of the collapse of the horde but quite rapidly itself became subject to the Ottoman Empire, which also conquered the coastal areas which had kept independent of the Khanate. A major source of prosperity in these times was frequent raids into Russia for slaves.
The accusation that Joseph Stalin was antisemitic is much discussed by historians. Although part of a movement that included Jews and rejected antisemitism, he privately displayed a contemptuous attitude toward Jews on various occasions that were witnessed by his contemporaries, and are documented by historical sources. In 1939, he reversed Communist policy and began a cooperation with Nazi Germany that included the removal of high profile Jews from the Kremlin. As dictator of the Soviet Union, he promoted repressive policies that conspicuously impacted Jews shortly after World War II, especially during the anti-cosmopolitan campaign. At the time of his death, Stalin was planning an even larger campaign against Jews. According to his successor Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin was fomenting the doctors' plot as a pretext for further anti-Jewish repressions.
In Search of Happiness is a 2005 Russian documentary film that poetically follows the lives of Boris and Masha Rak, Soviet Jews who in 1934 moved to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (JAO) created by the Soviet government in Russian Far East. The film won the Best Documentary award in the Russian Film Festival in 2006.
The Lviv pogroms were the consecutive pogroms and massacres of Jews in June and July 1941 in the city of Lwów in German-occupied Eastern Poland/Western Ukraine. The massacres were perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists, German death squads (Einsatzgruppen), and urban population from 30 June to 2 July, and from 25 to 29 July, during the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Thousands of Jews were killed both in the pogroms and in the Einsatzgruppen killings.
Nimereuca is a commune in Soroca District, Moldova. It is composed of two villages, Cerlina and Nimereuca.
The February Revolution in Russia officially ended a centuries-old regime of antisemitism in the Russian Empire, legally abolishing the Pale of Settlement. However, the previous legacy of antisemitism was continued and furthered by the Soviet state, especially under Joseph Stalin. After 1948, antisemitism reached new heights in the Soviet Union, especially during the anti-cosmopolitan campaign, in which numerous Yiddish-writing poets, writers, painters and sculptors were arrested or killed. This campaign culminated in the so-called Doctors' plot, in which a group of doctors were subjected to a show trial for supposedly having plotted to assassinate Stalin. Although repression eased after Stalin's death, persecution of Jews would continue until the late 1980s.
Antisemitism in the Russian Empire included numerous pogroms and the designation of the Pale of Settlement from which Jews were forbidden to migrate into the interior of Russia, unless they converted to the Russian Orthodox state religion.
Soviet leaders and authorities officially condemned nationalism and proclaimed internationalism, including the right of nations and peoples to self-determination. The Soviet Union was supportive of self-determination and rights of many minorities and colonized peoples. However, it significantly marginalized people of certain ethnic groups designated as "enemies of the people", pushed their assimilation, and promoted chauvinistic Russian nationalistic and settler-colonialist activities in their lands in stark violation of earlier policies under Lenin. Whereas Lenin had supported and implemented policies of korenization, Stalin reversed much of his predecessor's previous internationalist policies, signing off on orders to exile multiple ethnic-linguistic groups brandished as "traitors", including the Balkars, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Kalmyks, Koreans, and Meskhetian Turks, who were collectively deported to Siberia or Central Asia, where they were legally designated "special settlers", meaning that they were officially second-class citizens with few rights and were confined within small perimeters. After the death of Stalin, Khrushchev criticized the deportations based on ethnicity in a secret section of his report to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, describing them as "monstrous acts" and "rude violations of the basic Leninist principles of the nationality policy of the Soviet state." Soon thereafter, in the mid to late 1950s, most deported peoples were fully rehabilitated, having been allowed the full right of return, and their national republics were restored — except for the Koreans, Crimean Tatars, and Meskhetian Turks, who were not granted the right of return and were instead forced to stay in Central Asia. The government subsequently took a variety of measures to prevent such deported peoples from returning to their native villages, ranging from denying residence permits to people of certain ethnic groups in specific areas, referring to people by incorrect ethnonyms to minimize ties to their homeland, arresting protesters for requesting a return to Leninist policies with the right of return, and spreading racist propaganda demonizing ethnic minorities.
Jewish autonomy in Crimea was a project in the Soviet Union to create an autonomous region for Jews in the Crimean peninsula carried out during the 1920s and 1930s. Following the WWII and the creation of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the Far East, the project was abandoned, despite the existence of more than 80 kolkhozes and an attempt to renew the project in 1944 by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.
Veli İbraimov, also written as Veli Ibrahimov, was a Crimean Tatar revolutionary and Soviet politician who served as the second Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, serving from 1924 to 1928. Originally a member of Milliy Firqa and a delegate to the first Qurultay of the Crimean Tatar People, İbraimov joined the Russian Communist Party in 1918 and became a national communist authority within Crimea. An opponent of Jewish autonomy in Crimea, he met his downfall for his acts which were accused of being exclusively in the interests of the Crimean Tatars, and he was removed from his post and executed in 1928. In 1990, he was rehabilitated by Soviet authorities due to lack of evidence.
