JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Yoel Matveyev, the Forverts’ correspondent in Russia, was sitting alone in a Moscow train station in the middle of the night, when he suddenly got the inspiration to translate the Russian song, “Nadezhda”, about two lovers separated by a long and difficult journey, into Yiddish. Although the song was written in 1971, it remains hugely…
Observant Jews in far-flung locales face difficulty in getting kosher food, but perhaps nowhere is the challenge more acute than in Siberia’s Birobidzhan region, where a community of a few thousand — the remnant of a failed Soviet experiment in creating a Jewish mini-state – is trying to procure a steady supply of kosher meat…
For a couple of weeks several years ago, my Facebook wall filled up with photos from friends participating in the First International Summer Yiddish Program in Birobidzhan, the capital city of the Jewish Autonomous Region in Russia’s Far East. These were delightful group pictures taken next to the main points of interest for visiting Yiddishists…
The Kremlin’s self-styled flag experts have declared that the flag of Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region —which bears an uncanny resemblance to the rainbow gay pride symbol — is in fact 100% kosher, Buzzfeed World reported. The flag, designed in 1996 for the Birobidzhan region, boasts colorful stripes on a white background. It was under review…
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev approved a program to offer financial incentives encouraging Russian expats to move to the former Jewish autonomous region of Birobidzhan. The program hopes to bring about 2,000 people back to what once was a Jewish ethnic enclave, The Jerusalem Post reported. Birobidzhan was established in 1934 by Joseph Stalin in…
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