Five Jewish families have arrived in Birobidjan, once the autonomous Jewish region in Siberia, the first new Jewish settlers there in many years, according to a report in the Moscow newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya. The five families will live on a collective farm.
The newspaper quoted the chairman of a local Jewish collective as asserting that 60 more Jewish families would soon settle in Birobidjan which the Communists originally created as a Jewish region to counter the appeal of the Zionist movement among the Russian Jewish masses.
The Moscow newspaper pegged to the news report, a long and glowing description of the “opportunities” offered Jews in the Soviet Union as compared to the hardships and disappointments it alleged awaited the Jewish immigrant to Israel.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
