Why is there a Secret Jewish State Inside Russia?

Israel is seen by many, but certainly not by all, as being "the" Jewish state, but did you know that there is another place, once heralded as the New Zion or new homeland of the Jewish People... in Russia. Still to this day, this oblast has Yiddish as an official language.
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[@TheAmericanPrometheus]

I remember hearing proposals to abolish the JAO and merge it back into Khabarovsk Krai - mostly because the Jewish population of the JAO has been less than 1% for decades now.

[@kwabat5389]

there is about 800 jews as of 2021 i think. Probably less since Ukraine war

[@xa-12musk8]

Why would there be less?​@@kwabat5389

[@mind-blowing_tumbleweed]

Well it's because it's a hell hole and all the Jews left for Israel already

[@barbararouwendal8708]

because in fact nowadays jewish don't need a jewish state, why? Is there a catholic state? A protestant state? Faith is about living together as humans, with love. And love is Russia.

[@kwabat5389]

@@barbararouwendal8708 Russia is not love bro, and I say this as someone with a russian family

[@rayball36]

Soviet Jews: Can we go to Israel? Stalin: We have Israel at home. Israel at home: JAO

[@theancientsam]

This is close to the truth lol

[@bpcj4891]

I mean, it's not "secret." It's just unknown.

[@mbrofoc]

who think it was secret never look at map of russia

[@anglaismoyen]

KZbinrs are under a lot of pressure to sensationalise titles.

[@nvk-fq8ff]

yeah the whole title sounds quite sensetional and it could come off as anti-semitic and attract fans of a certain... political ideology. It's understandable that the creators have to make the thumbnails/titles more sensational to engage more people, but in this case it just comes off really weirdly

[@LEK-we2hh]

Not any more ))

[@jensholm5759]

Thats right. I met in many years ago, because USA tryed to resettle blacks to Monrovia in Africa.

[@SgtRocko]

I was born there in the 60s, raised there, and still have relatives there. The Jewish population is closer to 2000 (even the rabbi will agree) - a lot of people changed their nationality on line 5 to avoid the university/military quotas and other hinderances & are on the official registers as being Russians (the Mohel who did my Bris was ON PAPER 100% Russian LOL). It was good back then. We spoke Yiddish in school - a bunch of kids were non-Jews from families who'd been deported East under Stalin but disallowed from returning to the western part of the USSR - they & their families preferred speaking their own languages at home and Yiddish with others instead of Russian. Sadly, our Korean neighbours had been so utterly terrorised during the Great Terror that while they DID keep their food, they no longer knew how to speak Korean. In the Pioneers, we got little badges & a slice or 2 of Doctorskaya or a handful of sweets from the shops if we would read The Birobidzhaner Shtern out loud (in Yiddish) to people waiting on the trains in the station. It sounds silly NOW, but it was fun and we got some free sausage and candy so it was important to US LOL We also got to meet people arriving from other parts of the USSR and sometimes would get a piece of hard-to-find fruits (like Mandarins) or foreign coins for our collections. We got left alone, and now that I'm friends with other former Soviet Jews from the same time, I realised just how good we had it there. OH! The Synagogue was only for show by the time of the fire. Religious services were happening all the time, just in peoples' flats. Interesting video.

[@notsocrates9529]

Typical.

[@moshyroth]

Thanks for the fascinating details

[@CountingStars333]

Nice read

[@josvinke5656]

Thanks for sharing! Its nice to read personal experiences like this

[@YuliaHadassahK]

That's so interesting 🙂

[@undefined1777]

I'm from Russia and when I figured out there was a Jewish province inside our country, I was like "WTF???".

[@chimera9818]

That was never majority Jewish and was basically just Stalin schizo project

[@melone3113]

LOL, thats the huge size of Russia, even common Russians don't know their own provinces, Geography must have been a tough subject for yall

[@user-wd5vs1jc9b]

​@@melone3113 >80 (depends on your political opinion, let's say) and yeah, geography wasn't the easiest subject (easier than maths though)

[@melone3113]

@@user-wd5vs1jc9b I don't understand what the >80 means to say, but yeah, I am Indian and even my Geography is tough (forget about history 🙄🙄)

[@grottybt5006]

I was like that when I realised they have their own special police in the UK that protects their interests

[@SamAronow]

I met an actor from Birobidzhan once while working on a Chinese TV movie about the Doolittle Raid that will never be released due to political tensions. He had great difficulty explaining to people that he was from the "Jewish Autonomous Republic" which most people just assumed to mean Israel. He appreciated that I knew the difference.

[@limeboiler5471]

Omg hello Sam! big fan

[@harvardsmithdeangelo6905]

Oh wow that's so interesting! Do you know God or whatever? What's he like?

[@Graymenn]

You’d think he would just say he’s from Russia, smh

[@Meirstein]

@@Graymenn Advertising you're from Russia is not the most popular thing at the moment.

[@Graymenn]

@@Meirstein advertising you are an american hasnt been popular since 1945!

[@reytop5064]

As a Russian, who ofc knew about JAO preciousot, Jewish Autonomous Republic with just 800 Jews, is just hillarious!

[@GermanVa]

Maybe you should’ve not declined the republic from Volga-Germans. Would’ve been a prosperous and beautiful republic.

[@56Sheckles]

⁠@@GermanVamy dads side of the family was Volga Germans in Russia. They left when it went sour.

[@PartyNearTheDoorKBR]

I remember seeing it mentioned during Soviet times, i just didn’t know it still existed

[@arjunadan3812]

Were they descendants of the Khazars?

[@davidjacobs8558]

Siberia belong to Chinese since the Ancient times.

[@YoussefDaanBenAmor]

Wouldn’t be surprised if its integrated into a neighboring region soon, as it still exist purely because of its historical context.

[@jensschroder8214]

Fewer than 900 Jewish people there. I think the number will continue to dwindle. Those who make it will leave and the old ones will stay to look after the graves of their ancestors.

[@kwabat5389]

My jewish family stayed in belarus they didn't bother to go to the JAO

[@kwabat5389]

@@skp8748 Only people oppressed in palestine are the ones being oppressed by hamas, the Palestinian authority, islamic jihad and all the other terrorists. Israel is the home of the Jewish people it always will be

[@TeddyBelcher4kultrawide]

Jewish women average eight children

[@2memeornot224]

Never was a palestine, always Israel. From Biblical times to still now its always Israel

[@georgyekimov4577]

Thats quite logical right after one dictator asked the Jews to take a train ride another offers them to move onto a remote place in sibiria

[@HistoryHustle]

Cool you cover this. In 2019 I visited Birobidzhan and basically just for the story. It was an odd place with not much going on. Still I had a fun time though.

[@D.S.handle]

The whole history of the USSR both opposing and supporting national projects is pretty interesting.

[@barbararouwendal8708]

stalin did that... putin is trying to change that

[@TRYCLOPS1]

Russia is a very interesting country. It seems like another different dimension to me. It appears chaotic and random at parts and just crazy and unusual, but very interesting indeed. I am interested in East regions idk why. Found about this today while reading about Manchuria lol.

[@FloriaTosca8]

An old Soviet joke: There was only one Jew left in Birabidzhan -Shlagbaum(railway barrier in translation)

[@the7screw]

That's dark

[@caseclosed9342]

You should do a video on the Jewish population of Iran. Despite being at odds with Israel, Iran hosts a large Jewish population and preserves several Jewish sites. There is even a memorial for the Jewish soldiers killed in action during the Iran-Iraq war.

[@lesweizman388]

5-8k is not large compared to what it once was stop lying

[@caseclosed9342]

@@lesweizman388 it’s still the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside of Israel.

[@Seth9809]

Not large

[@skp8748]

​@@caseclosed9342 Yeah ashkenazi zionist terrorist conducted attacks to get demographics necessary in nascent israel to colonise Palestine

[@McFluff33]

Considering that only 8000 remain in the country of the estimated 300-350 thousand Jews around the world who trace their ancestry to Iran, this story while somewhat interesting remains little more than a peculiarity. Why not make a video including the stories of the living and thriving Persian Jewish communities in the US and Israel instead of focusing solely on the shattered remnants of that community.

[@vonPeterhof]

A small correction, but the JAO doesn't actually have Yiddish as a second official language, since the Russian constitution only recognizes the republics' right to designate state languages other than Russian (and in practice, even the republics don't always exercise that right in full). The JAO's charter only mentions Russian as the state language and then talks about "creating the conditions for the preservation, study and development of languages of the Jewish people and those of other peoples residing within the oblast", which is similar to the wording used in other non-republic subdivisions of Russia in relation to the languages of their indigenous and other minority ethnic groups.

[@D.S.handle]

That’s interesting. Could you quote an example from any of the republics? (A quote in Russian will do.)

[@vonPeterhof]

@@D.S.handle Tatarstan's constitution probably has the strongest wording affirming its local official language: 1. Государственными языками в Республике Татарстан являются равноправные татарский и русский языки. 2. В органах государственной власти, органах местного самоуправления, государственных учреждениях Республики Татарстан государственные языки Республики Татарстан употребляются на равных основаниях. There's other curious examples, like Dagestan which has the largest number of indigenous languages of any republic but doesn't specify any of them as official, only saying that "languages of the peoples of Dagestan" are official alongside Russian. De facto 14 languages including Russian have standardized writing systems and thus have official use, which is only about half of the actual number of languages that exist in Dagestan. Karelia is the only republic (not counting the "people's republics") to have Russian as the sole state language, but its constitution also mentions that it reserves the right to establish other state languages by referendum. The government of the republic does publish some materials in Finnish, Veps and at least two dialects of Karelian, all of which are mainly written in the Latin alphabet and thus barred from state language status by the federal constitution.

[@RealUlrichLeland]

0:48 Nearby to this there was for a brief period in the 17th century a Polish state called Jaxa that bordered Qing China, so it's possible there were a few Polish Jews living around the Amur river even long before the Jewish autonous oblast was formed.

[@D.S.handle]

Wow, I’ve never heard of Jaxa before. That’s an interesting tidbit.

[@OttomanSultana]

​@@D.S.handleJabzy has a great video on it. If you like Hilbert, you'll definitely like Jabzy.

[@izzykhach]

My great grandmother lived there

[@lizaperov1721]

Huh. my family immigrated from Birobidjan to Israel in 1999, plesently surprised someone made a video about this area, you actually researched into this. So accurate, thank you

[@manofwar2354]

Immagrated ? You mean stole other people land 😂😂😂😂

[@dr_frog01]

@@manofwar2354 what? She isnt an settler, thats like borning in roman-controlled greece and getting called "you stole our land" from the natives even tho the person has nothing to with them

[@manofwar2354]

@@dr_frog01 she still live on stolen lands In any country if the land contract belong to someone ,the police will give back the land to the owner if he asked even after gemerations

[@manofwar2354]

@@dr_frog01 no she is still living on stolen land and have the benefit She took what her farther stole

[@MyFather-mq5ue]

best you go back or settle somewhere else

[@LionFeldman]

Funnily enough my mother is from Birobidzhan which is a city in the JAO, her father is originally a jew from Ukraine but he and many others fled when the germans invaded. He ended up being a fairly high ranking politician in the JAO, and later moved to Israel where we now live.

[@canadianmmaguy7511]

Free Palestine

[@ludaMerlin69]

Im sure i was told that jews being high ranking politicians in russia was a conspiracy theory...

[@IKMojito]

Free Palestine²

[@Kosovar_Chicken]

@@canadianmmaguy7511Free Kurdistan

[@Ikreisrond]

​@@canadianmmaguy7511 Reported to Alphabet for promoting terrorism.

[@alansmithee8831]

Hello Hilbert. I had heard of this, but interesting to get more detail. Now I just need to stop myself thinking of songs from "Fiddler on the Roof".

[@limeboiler5471]

This is not a secret, also not a state, but an autonomous area

[@Dovid2000]

In the years 1679-1680, the Jews of Yemen were sent to a desert region known as Mawza, until they were permitted to return to their former places. This expulsion of Jews to Mawza is known as the "Mawza exile." There is a Wikipedia article describing this exile.

[@RosaHernandez-vy4dm]

In the years 2023 - 2024 the jews of israel are killing the palestinians of gaza sent them to death whit not places to return. This killing of palestinians is known as the holocaust 2.0

[@buckyhermit]

I've seen this place with my own eyes, but from the Chinese side of the river. It was very surreal because the Chinese side had a hum of activity but across the river, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast felt and sounded empty. Not to mention it was a 3-hour time difference or something, which was due to daylight saving in summer and China's weird time zone alignment.

[@TheVanpablo79]

Because most people who claim to be Jewish are actually Slavic (not Jewish at all)

[@achilles7607]

Not true. But you know all right...

[@PhilipusArabus]

@@achilles7607he is right, look at them, they look out of context in the region

[@curtisthomas2670]

Sounds more legitimate a homeland for Khazars from the Caucasus and Ashkenazis from Germany than somewhere in the middle east

[@robertfansler7800]

Now that they discovered diamonds there, they will be rushing back 😂

[@adrianng8367]

My Russian friend told me about it when I was in A levels. Happy that it got coverage by a channel like yours. Cheers🎉

[@ThomasBoyd-yf5wm]

Awesome. Brilliant content. Well said.

[@connorscanlan2167]

"Secret." Interesting choice of words.

[@HasselnodderTube]

Clickbait

[@JS-fd8ey]

I was a Russian studies major in university, and I did an entire research paper on the history of the region including the JAO.

[@deecawford]

Learned more about this area through this video thank you. I remember hearing of it but didn’t know it lasted as long as it did.

[@StanEby1]

Never knew of it. Great job.

[@michaelowino228]

Good video.

[@OddRagnarDengLerstl]

I discovered this area when visiting Harbin in China some years ago. Someone had made a small display of some information about the oblast. But since it was in mostly chinese I had to find out more about it myself. Mostly the same as the video.

[@GeorgeOneEleven]

The JAO failed because it was essentially a Bantustan... Nothing more than just a tiny wedge of land tucked in a far away corner of the country where the undesirable ethnic minorities can be resettled. In fact, it's even worse than a Bantustan, because at least those were located somewhat within their historical homelands. The reality is, Zionism was only ever going to succeed in a location that's connected to the Jewish people. Otherwise, there would've been no incentive to stay and put up with the violence and hardship. You can always try again another time in a different land, after all. And that's exactly what happened here with the JAO.

[@bittertruth6575]

It is almost twice the size of Israel, so there was no need for them to take Palestinian land.

[@GeorgeOneEleven]

@@bittertruth6575 Framing the establishment of Israel as the Zionists "taking Palestinian land" is such an oversimplification that it's not even worth getting into. Besides, every piece of land everywhere on the planet can be claimed by some ethnic group somewhere. The JAO is within the historic region of Manchuria, for example, where no Manchurians live today. Yet I've never seen anyone call to "Free Manchuria".

[@nieksalden2603]

Thank you for this special item.

[@carlinthomas9482]

The original JAO was to be in Crimea, there were organizations that existed that lobbied to have Crimea and parts of southern Ukraine to be a JAO. Stalin axed the idea due to potential conflict with other ethnic groups in the area, and settled on its current location for strategic reasons, as mentioned in the video.

[@geralddavidson55]

Yes. I recall reading through a Soviet publication in 1979 was showed the Jewish Oblast on a map and a description in the text. Years later I happened to meet a group of young Israelis in 2016 in NZ and we got talking as you do and one of the topics was the Soviet Autonomous Jewish zone. As it happened they were familiar with the subject I had raised.. More astonished that someone in NZ knew about something pretty much unknown.

[@icreatedanaccountforthis1852]

This is fascinating.

[@mikejames5743]

Bolshevik Inner party were mostly jewish. Red Army itself was mostly jewish as well.

[@alexleibovici4834]

> Bolshevik Inner party were mostly jewish. Red Army itself was mostly jewish as well. 🤣🤣🤣

[@robertfansler7800]

Thanks to Jews, Russia “enjoyed” 70 years of Communist rule.

[@ingevankeirsbilck9601]

Thank you for this interesting video! You inadvertently gave me a great idea : I've been wanting to learn Hebrew but I don't have enough time. This video made me realize I could learn Yiddish first so at least I'll learn the alphabet. I'm a native Dutch speaker from Belgium with a degree in German so picking up the actual language once I can read it should be doable.

[@DigitalIDTV]

❤u r spot on. Bless you.

[@johncody2209]

The Jewish Autonomous Oblast is not a "secret state". You just didn't know about it until recently. It has been on the map since long before you were born. Never been a secret.

[@kellymcalien3351]

Interesting. I did not know this.

[@tadsklallamn8v]

Yes many Jews joined the reds. My family were Jewish in Ukraine in a village with a creek that fed into the Southern Bug. My side of the family fled a pogrom to Ellis Island. My great uncles who stayed behind fought in the Black Army, then another pogrom occurred under anarchist "rule", so they joined the reds.

[@jakemocci3953]

We know, they loved murdering Christians, as they do to this day.

[@bremnersghost948]

Hi Hilbert, worth a mention that the JAO has had some of the highest casualties percentage wise of any Oblast during the Invasion of Ukraine

[@kdexter2690]

Really?

[@bremnersghost948]

@@kdexter2690 Aye really Dexter, I wouldn't insult Hilbert's channel by talking rubbish, Buryats & Sakhas % wise had taken more last I saw with JAO and Kaliningrad 3 & 4, Curious that russia have wasted so many of their men from Kaliningrad though.

[@kdexter2690]

@@bremnersghost948 where are you from?

[@bremnersghost948]

@@kdexter2690 I'm British Dexter

[@kdexter2690]

@@bremnersghost948 I love British I would like to go in the UK 🇬🇧 permanently I would like to marry a British person Love UK 🇬🇧

[@LaNiBlackLight]

My great-Grandfather and his wife were jews from Ukraine, Kherson. He joined the red army adn fought in the war, but when he came back after the war, one of the first things that happened to him, is that the soviets forced him and his relatives that survived to pack a small amount of items and move to the oblast, where they stayed until stalin died. Not all of the jews in this oblast were volunteers to go there, and not all were refugees..

[@gusloader123]

History with Hilbert: Interesting video. I have always been a "History guy" since elementary school days, but I have never heard of the place / region before or of the planned by Moscow apparatchiks settlement there for Jews. Looks like a cold, windy, bleak region according to the map.

[@joshsingleton576]

Suggestion: Look up City of Joel in Monroe, NY

[@sergecashman4822]

I thought it was a well known fact, not a secret. When I lived in Israel I've actually met one person from Birabidjan. One thing to note is that people could not move freely inside the USSR. They were forced to move by the government. Like, Crimean Tatars being moved to exile in the east for instance. Or, in most cases, the government would relocate you because they needed workers somewhere where nobody wanted to go. There was no zionist movement in the USSR to speak of. Many secular Jews were Bolshevicks and other types of Communists - like Trotsky for example, but there was no massive support for communism among Jewish communities whatsoever. There was hardly any way to emigrate from the USSR to anywhere. There was a short period of time in the 80s when some people got out (after a stay in Vienna most of them chose either USA or Germany). Other tan that you couldn't get out until the 90s (like my family did). Although somehow Daniel Craig's character from the film "Defiance" did end up living in Brooklyn after the war. Go figure. When there's a will there is a way. During the civil war many people managed to escape, but that's before the USSR existed. The main reason the oblast (region) existed is that Stalin had a plan to relocate Jews to the far east. To get rid a potentially troublesome population in the Ukraine (and other places within the pale of settlement) and move them some place where you will never hear from them again. Like with Crimean Tatars. He started a campaign against the "cosmopolitans" with the doctors' affair towards the end of his life (arresting some most prominent Jewish doctors in Moscow). That was most likely a result of Israel unexpectedly aligning with the West. All indications were towards a massive clampdown on people who were ethnically Jewish, or rather part-Hebrew. Pretty much nobody was religiously Jewish at that point. I have met only one religious Jew during my 19 years in the USSR (one of the Refusniks), even though most of my parents' friends self identified as Jewish. Stalin died (or more likely was assassinated by Beria) before the plan was implemented. Otherwise there would be A LOT of Jews in Birabidjan.

[@derrickstorm6976]

"Why?" or "How?"

[@DougGlendower]

And by "secret" we mean published in many, many Western atlases for a long, long time. "Forgotten" or "Ignored" would have served better here.

[@pieegee8532]

Thats something obscure that i never knew

[@g6otu]

Jew to non jew ratio is about 1 to 50.

[@canadianmmaguy7511]

It's 1 to 200 worldwide , they own everything and the world is a bad place. Weird paradox

[@dragonrykr]

I love this Oblast's flag

[@nigelflood7074]

I knew about that region , sad to see about it's decline

[@MMerlyn91]

Is the L'Chayim Comrade Stalin documentary available on youtube?

[@benqurayza7872]

I don't know. I once met the filmmaker, Yale Strom, who seems to want people to either buy it or rent it from a reputable distributor, so he obtains some revenue from his work.

[@revinhatol]

I wonder if the JAO would evolve into the Republic of Birobidzhan...?

[@SlideRSB]

Bald and Bankrupt visited this region and did a video about it maybe last year.

[@jeremiasrobinson]

I didn't know it was a secret.

[@bpcj4891]

It isn't

[@benqurayza7872]

It was very publicly promoted in Soviet propaganda.

[@jesusisasocialist]

Thought of doing some work with Sam Aronow?

[@marshamunger6004]

Very interesting . Thanks. I'm Jewish with some ancestry perhaps from that region. I truly wonder about this .

[@alexleibovici4834]

> I'm Jewish with some ancestry perhaps from that region Improbable. Jews lived there since 1928 till now and were no more than 20 thousands at their peak. They were a very small percentage of Soviet and Eastern European Jews

[@FierceLord]

I wonder if theres also tunnels there too.

[@raymondaloni2309]

Hur hur hur!!!! Wow aren't you a hoot!? Did your Mother claim you were special growing up??? I bet she did.

[@Ikreisrond]

If there are no Arabs or North Koreans, there are no tunnels.

[@goatt6811]

​@@Ikreisrond so why are there tunnels in newyork in j3w communities

[@manofwar2354]

​@@Ikreisrondbecause arabs dont steal lands unlike jews 😂😂😂😂

[@fodonogue3]

@@Ikreisrondfunny how all of those tunnels were created by the reich in isntreal.

[@billhanna8838]

So they do have a homeland they havent been evicted from ?

[@saulchapnick1566]

Thank you for posting this. It is a very important topic on many levels. You overlooked some events, and was incorrect about other facts, but not worth quibbling about. Been studying Birobidzhan for decades. My Father may have passed by there during the war. Sadly, many extremist antisemites want to ship all Jews there today. It is mentioned in their sites. Birobidzhan has always been on my “to visit” bucket list.

[@DC-ux1dt]

Clearly not secret.

[@l1mi13]

I love this subject, its like walking on crushed glass when you discuss it! So soon Russia can write "jude fr**" on the map! Didnt know about this but its not surprising considering the.. the history of that people and how Stalin acted. He often used demographics as a weapon, its not a coincidence that Ukraine happen to have territory from several diffrent countries like Poland, Romania, Russia & Hungary.

[@universome511]

1:33 oh yeah I'm sure Bolshevism was as Gentile as a Bake Sale at a Lutheran Church

[@trunkage]

The progroms started before 1917 and lead to the fall of the Pale of Settlement amount other things I'm pretty sure Harbin has quite a few Jews as the fled in the 1500s and that area was taken from China in 1917. Its only 400km from the current Russian border. I wonder if some of them were moved before the Japanese took over

[@ralphmayers608]

Volume set far too low

[@EvgeniyShmukler]

Why the header calls it "A secret"? Who is it a secret for?

[@timanderson5981]

At the time the JAO was founded, it could really be claimed this was (almost) a "Land without People". Certainly, there would have been far fewer people in that region than in Palestine, and would have caused fewer problems.

[@MrReynardMULDRAKE]

once i devoted to apple time to subjects of the federation so became aware of its existence (…)

[@SkateSka]

Formerly jewish, not really autonomous, likely to no longer be an oblast in the near future.

[@gmjones3110]

It's got a very interesting flag too

[@TrustyworthyWorm]

Kaganovich visited it a few times. Molotov wanted Crimea to be a state.

[@SamAronow]

Tauride territorialism had been around since the civil war; its relevance ebbed and flowed over the next thirty years but never too seriously.

[@TrustyworthyWorm]

⁠​⁠​⁠@@SamAronowWell yeah, Molotov, Kaganonich and one other guy tried to overthrow Krushchev in 1957 but failed when Zhukov stepped in. Kaganovich lived out the rest of his days getting demoted to a mine and then went blind before passing away in 1991, four months before the Soviet Union collapsed. If Lenin had lived or Trotsky had taken power, the states/autonomous regions they wanted could have been huge. The Soviet Union switched to supporting Israel after WW2 but that changed in the early 50s, especially with leaders in Czechoslovakia and Romania really angering Stalin, which lead to a plot by Stalin which never came to fruition due to his death. Krushchev always supported Egypt and Palestine, he also never allowed the criminals on the early to mid to pop back up, but Brezhnev did allow them to pop up, then the next 3 Soviet leaders allowed them to fester, letting the drunkard Yeltsin to let them flourish in the 1990s to become the oligarchs that Putin now pushes out windows. Oh yeah, Zelensky is also the first Jewish leader of Ukraine since Kaganovich, who was first Secretary of Ukraine multiple times.

[@SamAronow]

@@TrustyworthyWorm Soviet support for Israel was contingent on the assumption that the pro-Soviet Mapam would be part of government. However Mapam's very support for the USSR is one of the things* that kept them _out_ of government, so Stalin fell back on his prewar antisemitism (with Kaganovich as the notable exception). *The other two being their opposition to the 1949 armistices ending the Israeli War of Independence and their support for a right-of-return for Arabs displaced during said war. In the context of contemporary politics these two things seem diametrically opposed, but given Mapam's enthusiasm for the Soviet Union's self-mythologizing, it makes sense.

[@TrustyworthyWorm]

@@SamAronow Yes, what Trotsky wanted, even though he still supported Israel after getting kicked of the Soviet Union. Many of his relatives live in Israel today, same for Kaganovich. Yagoda had no descendants so I don’t know what his would do. Stalin himself was a man of faith, bringing back the Orthodox Church in 1941 which doubled the amount of churches, in the Soviet Union he went to Orthodox confession three time from late 30s, 1941, and before he died. Molotov supported a Crimean state and still embraced Christian traditions, Kaganovich did not, may have actually been very negative about. Stalin also made abortion illegal in the 30s. Ultimately Kaganovich, Anna Paulker, Molotov, and some other were likely the last powerful communists so support a Jewish state openly. 1957 wasn’t the first time Krushchev opposed Zionism but he seems far more emboldened by having less people weigh him down. He had Jewish family members, he never wanted to endorse hatred of anyone, he genuinely thought that taking land away from a people and giving it to another was legitimately evil. Krushchev has been described by his sons as having an Encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible and a man of genuine faith, though he for some reason still shut down orthodox churches in 1955, wonder if he wanted that or if some other people in his government pushed him. The Russian people have gone through so much pain and suffering, it is not their fault they have had to face such pain, same as Serbia.

[@SamAronow]

@@TrustyworthyWormI am totally unaware of any interest Trotsky had in Zionism, except perhaps out of spite for Stalin. By all accounts he was extremely assimilated and disinterested in Jewish issues.

[@TheEd0206]

The location of the area was very thoughtfully considered. They can get Chinese food anytime.

[@negritotenfold]

Northern China has weak cuisine

[@robertfansler7800]

They can own a Chinese restaurant, and have Chinese work for them at minimum wage.😂

[@rudolfsbelozerovs7816]

More to the point why did the nkvd speak yiddish and why was yiddish an inside language for the KGB?

[@Noahthelasercop]

The title sounds kinda sus

[@Mot1956]

It is not secret, not Jewish, not a state It is a region with local language being Yiddish. It’s Jewish population is 0,6%. Less than Russian population of Chechnya. JAO regional head is a Jew, and JAO has one of the highest representation of ethnic Russians in its government (funnily enough).

[@belialord]

the audio is too low

[@felip3442]

Turn up the volume

[@JukeBoxDestroyer]

since when has it been a secret? I read about it on wiki 13 years ago

[@FranzBieberkopf]

"Secret" my rectum! I learned about Birobidzhan when doing history A-Levels in 1980. Stalin and his pals were far from bashful when describing the joys of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast on it's launch in the 1920s. Not what I would call secret, to put it mildly.

[@jFig88]

it's not a secret just because you didn't know about it

[@bullrun2772]

Yeah I agree also it’s an plan but never really happened didn’t why the title is sitting of lying

[@timbeloglazov]

Secret? 😂 Region's name is literally "Jewish autonomous Oblast".

[@lulapt2030]

aka: entire country

[@x_griffin_x]

the framing is a little odd, but pogroms had also happened frequently prior to the 1917 Revolution, and the Tsarist government’s use and incitement of antisemitism during the instability of the Empire’s end led to a lot of this too

[@ricodelavega4511]

i'm not jewish, but i have wondered why there werent several jewish states. Imagine if the zionists had taken up musolini's proposal for a jewish state in Ethiopia. There couldve been 3 jewish states. Hope this JAO survives, and thrives once Russia becomes democratic again.

[@tremblence]

I have friends that visited there..... said the people there are racist and unkind towards others

[@RealUlrichLeland]

Because Soviet Wario had another terrible idea.

[@kazkazimierz1742]

Bald And Bankrupt has video on this place.

[@dracodistortion9447]

isn't Xiaoma from there?

[@woltews]

I think this should have been titled "Why used to be there a Secret Jewish State Inside Russia"

[@bullrun2772]

Yeah that’s weird

[@user-mg2ip8cr8z]

How is it secret when its in the name of the place ???

[@kreuner11]

Why would you call it "secret"

[@Kadamien]

Well, I suppose it's not so secret anymore.

[@ilghiz]

_A _*_secret_*_ Jewish state_ So *secret* that Wikipedia has over 100 articles about it including most exotic languages let alone English, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Chinese...

[@hahahahahha8458]

Well well well

[@user-fo8io1ix6c]

There have been many areas and enclaves in the sovjet were the "Jews" were possible to get away so they didnt had to go to war and risk the life. It was seeing that ,among the "Jews", that let the dum slaves and kaukaisan pops be pressed in to war and be eradicated.

[@revinhatol]

*GONG XI FA CAI!

[@revolutionstudios5052]

Adolf Hitler on the 21st of June, 1941:

[@Donkeypapuas]

Secret? Birobidjan is not a secret.