Siberia as the Promised Land: The Creation of the Jewish Autonomous Region in the USSR

This project analyzes the ways in which Siberia was imagined in debates and representations from government officials and State planners as a territory beyond the frozen penal colony paradigm and turned into a promised land of the future. Specifically, this paper delves into the creation of the Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR) and the city of Birobidzhan between the 1920s and 1950s. Analyzing the writings of Jewish migrants from other regions of the Soviet Union and Yiddish immigrants from abroad, as well as cartographic representations, this paper explores the ways in which Siberia was constructed as a land that could become the long-awaited answer to the Jewish territoriality, a Soviet promised land. As an example, a Jewish author of the period, David Bergel'son (1884 - 1952), understood Birobidzhan in the Far East of Soviet Russia as the land that would break the cycle of continuous Jewish migrations that characterized their existence. It would be the place where the assimilation that the Jews had to endure in each territory they arrived would be reversed.

Analyzing the creation of the JAR during this period allows me to understand how the frozen frontier of Siberia turned into the canvas on which religious, cultural, social, geographical and political imaginations intersected and materialized. It analyses how the land of ice was harnessed symbolically to turn it from an icy wilderness to a rejuvenating land where a civilization could thrive.