Cultured Pearl

New York newspapers last week broke out in a rash of three-quarter-page fund-raising advertisements extolling the beauties and virtues of the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidjan in Soviet Siberia. The voice was the voice of California chambers of commerce, but the hands were the hands of Russia.

U.S. bigwigs (Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace, Senator Alben Barkley, Mayor O'Dwyer), innocently anxious to sponsor any benevolent-sounding cause, and ignoring the timing of the new campaign, endorsed Birobidjan.

Birobidjan was the latest move in Russia's drive for influence among the Arabs of the Middle east. In UNO Russia had stood behind Arab Syria and Lebanon in their dispute with France and Great Britain. Now Russia was reminding the Arab world that she did not support Zionism, in fact already had a substitute Zion. In Palestine, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, President of the World Zionist Organization, stated unequivocally: "It is perfectly useless to offer the Jews a substitute for Palestine."

"More Sunshine." In Soviet foreign propaganda organs, Birobidjan is described as the "Pearl of the Far East." Last week's advertisements gave details. Birobidjan was on the same latitude as Duluth, Minn., "but with lots more sunshine." Its fertile soil yielded rich crops (wheat, oats, cabbage, rice, soy beans). Its natural resources were rich and variegated (coal, iron ore, gold, graphite, marble, magnesite). Its woods teemed with fur-bearing animals. "According to scientific surveys," the region could maintain a population of at least four million.

No such advertisement of Birobidjan's attractions was to be found in the domestic Soviet press, Jewish or Gentile. Nor were inquiring foreign Jews welcome visitors. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union has intermittently encouraged its own citizens to settle there. Between 1928 and 1933, 19,000 of them did so; the cold winds blew 12,000 of them back. After 1931, when the Japanese across the Amur River in Manchuria were considered a threat to the Trans-Siberian Railroad, the Soviet Government sold land and the necessary farming equipment to Jewish settlers in Birobidjan for a less-than-cost fee of $200. But by 1939 the total population of Birobidjan, including earlier, non-Jewish settlers, had reached only 108,000.

The Pearl of the Far East remained embedded in its chilly Siberian oyster.

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