American Jewish Committee Fears Possibility of Biro-bidjan Revival

The American Jewish Committee today reported that it had received information from its Paris office stating that a plan for large-scale settlement of Soviet Jews in Biro-Bidjan, in Siberia, may be presented to the forthcoming congress of the Communist Party which opens in Moscow at the end of this month. The Committee expressed concern over “the future of Soviet Jews.”

The congress in Moscow will discuss the development of Soviet Asia within the framework of its projected Seven-Year Plan for 1959-65. In this connection, the Committee said, the plan for a large-scale movement of Jews to Biro-Bidjan will be considered. The Committee visualized that the plan could take three possible courses:

1. A larger Jewish settlement than the present one, but still only a token settlement. This would enable the Soviet rulers to declare the Jewish population of the Soviet Union “wherever they may reside” as members of a “territorial nationality ” and on that basis “to deny them their cultural and other rights outside of Biro-Bidjan.”

2. Biro-Bidjan would officially be made available to the Jewish population as a Jewish territory, and various means of indirect inducement would be applied to the Jews to settle there.

3. The forced mass resettlement of Jews to Biro-Bidjan. According to the report, “what is involved in the situation is the reappearance in Soviet life of a Jewish pale of settlement, a vast official Soviet ghetto.”

Citing Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev’s statement last year that Jews were excessively individualistic and unwilling to participate in collective work, the American Jewish Committee pointed out that this was followed by sudden publicity in the Soviet press in praise of Biro-Bidjan, where Jews were said to live a normal life and to enjoy their Jewish identity.