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The Jewish Steppe | |
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Directed by | Valery Ovchinnikov |
Release date |
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Running time | 16 minutes |
Language | English |
The Jewish Steppe is a 2001 documentary about a group of Russian Jews who, suffering as a result of prejudice and fearful of pogroms, left their homeland to farm the Crimean Peninsula. Established in the 1920s, their Soviet agrarian commune was destroyed.
"Why should the Jewish people go to Palestine where the land is less productive and requires big investments?" a Jewish newspaper asked at the time of the settlement, "Who go so far if the fertile Crimean land is beckoning to the Jewish people?"
At the turn of the twentieth century, antisemitism was common in Russia. Legislation was passed that limited Jews to working only in retail and handicrafts. When these laws were lifted, around the time the Russian Revolution of 1917, pogroms broke out. Approximately 30,000 Jews left for the Crimean Peninsula. Rare pictures and film footage from the Russian State Film and Photo Archive are narrated in The Jewish Steppe to explain how they lived there.
One newspaper wrote that everyone on the steppe was competing with each other to work harder. When, in 1931, famine occurred in Russia, the Jewish settlements continued to have an abundant harvest that helped feed the rest of the nation during its grain shortage.
Two years after it was settled, the area was recognized as the Soviet Union's first Jewish district. They went on to establish schools and two colleges.
"As a result of healthy life and labor," a local farmer commented in a newspaper, "peace of mind is replacing the nervousness typical for Jewish people. Movements have become measured, and faces have become calm." He went on to say that these changes were particularly noticeable in the younger generation.
Under Joseph Stalin, the commune was destroyed, leaving only archival footage and documents.
Other documentaries about Jews of the Diaspora:
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 antisemitic discriminatory policies and persecution, including violent pogroms.
The Pale of Settlement was a western region of the Russian Empire with varying borders that existed from 1791 to 1917 in which permanent residency by Jews was allowed and beyond which Jewish residency, permanent or temporary, was mostly forbidden. Most Jews were still excluded from residency in a number of cities within the Pale as well. A few Jews were allowed to live outside the area, including those with university education, the ennobled, members of the most affluent of the merchant guilds and particular artisans, some military personnel and some services associated with them, including their families, and sometimes their servants. Pale is an archaic term meaning an enclosed area.
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 Ministry of State Security were worried about their influence and connections with the West. They were officially rehabilitated in 1988.
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 Ostsiedlung.
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 (341–1204), the Empire of Trebizond (1204–1461), 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 Jewish Territorial Organisation, known as the ITO, was a Jewish political movement which first arose in 1903 in response to the British Uganda Scheme, but only institutionalized in 1905. Its main goal was to find an alternative territory to that of Palestine, which was preferred by the Zionist movement, for the creation of a Jewish homeland. The organization embraced what became known as Jewish Territorialism also known as Jewish Statism. The ITO was dissolved in 1925.
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. Stalin argued that the Jews possessed a national character but were not a nation and were thus unassimilable. He argued that Jewish nationalism, particularly Zionism, was hostile to socialism. 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, which included the deportation of all Jews within the Soviet Union to Northern Kazakhstan. 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.
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. Soviet internationalism during the era of the USSR and within its borders meant diversity or multiculturalism. This is because the USSR used the term "nation" to refer to ethnic or national communities and or ethnic groups. The Soviet Union claimed to be 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. Whereas Vladimir Lenin had supported and implemented policies of korenizatsiia, Joseph Stalin reversed much of the previous policies, signing off on orders to deport and exile multiple ethnic-linguistic groups brandished as "traitors to the Fatherland", including the Balkars, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Kalmyks, Koreans and Meskhetian Turks, with those, who survived the collective deportation to Siberia or Central Asia, were legally designated "special settlers", meaning that they were officially second-class citizens with few rights and were confined within small perimeters.
Am Olam was a movement among Russian Jews to establish agricultural colonies in America. The name means "Eternal People" and is taken from the title of an essay by Peretz Smolenskin. It was founded in Odessa in 1881 by Mania Bakl and Moses Herder, who called for the creation of Socialist agricultural communities in the United States.
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 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.
The region of Siberia has been home to Jews since the late 18th century, although Jewish communities did not exist in large part until after 1861, when Tsar Alexander II lifted the restrictions of his father, Tsar Nikolai I regarding Jews in the Pale of Settlement.