Rare collection with 42 photograph postcards depicting the Jewish agricultural settlements in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast Birobidzhan and the Jewish settlements in Ukraine, 1930s. Local Russian publication.
The postcards show photographs of Jews working in fields, at rest, and group pictures of Jewish children – children of the laborers, and a number of photographs of Communist leaders and activists.
The Jewish agricultural settlements in Ukraine were the fruit of the Uzat organization – “the public company for the promotion of the conversion to agriculture of the working Jews in the Soviet Union.” Its goal was to provide sources of livelihood to the hundreds of thousands of Jews who lost their sources of livelihood during WWI. The decision to establish an autonomous Jewish region was taken on March 28th, 1928, under the chairmanship of the central executive committee of the USSR. The region was established in 1934 and registered in the Russian constitution as an independent Jewish region. Following the decision, agricultural settlements were established on the Crimean peninsula and the southern Ukraine, as well as the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in eastern Russia, whose capital was Birobidzhan. The official language in these areas was Yiddish, not Hebrew. For Russian interests, mainly preservation of the eastern border, Jewish settlement in these areas was encouraged, and they even produced a film entitled Seekers of Happiness about a family who left the United States due to the economic depression and came to the area. The Jewish settlers established the settlement from scratch. When the Jewish population in the area grew, Jewish culture began to develop there. A Jewish newspaper was published in Yiddish, called Birobidzhashaner ( Birobidzhan Star ). Some of the settlements had Hebrew names: Yetzirah, Avodah, Mishmar, and Tel Chai. Streets were named after Yiddish authors such as Sholem Aliechem and Y. L. Peretz. The plan was stopped when Stalin began to persecute the Jews in the mid-1930s. Liquidation of the Jewish settlement was completed in 1941 with the German conquest.
After WWII there was an attempt to renew the settlement as a solution for refugees, but the idea was not successful. As far as we know, there is no visual documentation of these areas from this period. These postcards are also not listed in catalogs documenting Jewish postcards from the period.
Postcard size: 14×10 cm. Overall very fine condition. The postcards were not sent in the mail. Some of the postcards have ink stamps on the reverse.