[1] According to Peter Matthiessen in The Birds of Heaven, p20-21, “According to local memory, thousands of Jews from Ukraine and elsewhere were transported here during the vast purges and organized famines of the mid-1930s… most of the displaced were city dwellers… a large number of Jews died…” In May 1928 the first group of Jewish settlers from cities and villages in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia arrived in the region that became the Jewish Autonomous Oblast.
[7] The Beit Menachem Synagogue, completed in 2004, is accompanied by a complex housing Sunday School classrooms, a library, a museum, and administrative offices.
[10] In 2004 the Regional Government announced that Chief Rabbi of Russia Berel Lazar has agreed to take part in the 70th anniversary celebration for the Jewish Autonomous Oblast.
Rabbi Lazar and Avraham Berkowitz, the Executive Director of the Federation of Jewish Communities CIS will lead a delegation to Birobidjan for the event.
Together they inspected local cemeteries and gathered information about the Jews buried there in the years prior to World War II.
Rabbi Lazar and Avraham Berkowitz, the Executive Director of the Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS, led a delegation to Birobidzhan for the event.
Local Jewish Community leaders; Mayor Alexander Vinnikov, Lev Toitman and Valery Solomonovich Gurevich also participated in the opening of the Birobidzhan Orthodox Synagogue, which marked the 70th anniversary of the region.
[17][18][19] For the Chanukah celebration of 2007, officials of Birobidzhan in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast claimed to have built the world's largest chanukia[20] at approximately 21 metres (69 ft) tall.