Touched by the “Thaw”: Soviet Jews between Stalin’s Death and the 1967 War in the Middle East (original) (raw)

Das östliche Europa als Verflechtungsraum Agency in der Geschichte. Roland Borchers, Alina Bothe, Markus Nesselrodt, Agnieszka Wierzcholska (Herausgeber) 2021 Metropol-Verlag

Soviet Jews between Stalin's Death and the 1967 War in the Middle East The May 1954 issue of the Moscow literary journal Znamia (Banner) carried the first part of Ilya Ehrenburg's novel The Thaw. The novel's metaphoric name clicked with the image of society-at least its more sophisticated parts-striving at that time to discern signs of being permitted to live a life less suppressed than during the long Stalinist freeze. The name firmly stuck to the time until October 1964, when Nikita Khrushchev was removed from the top of the Soviet pyramid of power. In fact, his ousting generally did not engender an immediate turn in policy towards the Jews, which came after the June 1967 war in the Middle East. The following attempts to describe the social profile of Soviet Jewry during the "Jewish Thaw," 1953-1967. The "Jews of Silence" The 1959 census revealed that the USSR had roughly 2,268,000 people, or 1.09 percent of the entire population, who defined themselves as Jewish. They did not form a homogenous entity, although variations based on old Ashkenazic differences between Litvaks (Lithuanian and Belorussian Jews), Ukrainian Jews, Polish Jews, and other Yiddish speakers had lost most of their meaning for the younger generation. Still, contemporary differences between Jews living in such cities as Moscow, Leningrad, Riga, or Odessa certainly played a role. Even wider and deeper could be the gap between city residents and those who lived in provincial towns. There was also a divide between "old Soviet" Jews and those who became Soviet in 1939 or 1940. Along with the numerically dominant Ashkenazic Jews, several other ethnoreligious subgroups comprised a minority: Georgian Jews (over 35 thousand), Mountain, or Caucasian Jews (over 25 thousand), Bukharan, or Central Asian Jews (over 20 thousand), and smaller groups of several thousand Krymchaks, Karaites, and Kurdistan Jews. Contacts between Jews from different subgroups were rare, especially outside the areas of Central Asia and the Caucasus where