Talk:Jewish Autonomous Oblast

message: "In 1991, the Jewish Autonomous Region was elevated to the status of an Autonomous Republic [...]"
"Some political observers [...] have proposed resurrecting the Jewish Autonomous Republic"
Somewhen in between it must have been changed to a "oblast".
:Actually, while the possibility of JAO becoming a republic was heavily debated, it never actually came into life.  Ever since JAO fell under the juristiction of the Federation in 1991 (as opposed to being a part of Khabarovsk Krai before), it remained an autonomous oblast.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 16:13, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: When changed from republic to oblast?

message: About this sentence: 
:"...was founded with the help of Komzet in 1928 as the Jewish National District. It was the result of Vladimir Lenin's nationality policy..." 
This is wrong for several reasons. First of all, Lenin died in January 1924. Second, this nationality policy was introduced by Stalin at a later date. Third, it is also ideologically inconsistent: between 1923-1928 there were major conflicts and changes within the Bolshevik party - one of which is the conflict of 'internationalism vs nationalism' in which Lenin and his close comrades effectively represented the internationalism, while Stalin and his men represented nationalism. So this policy conflicted with Lenins ideology.
Therefore, I corrected the name in this article to Josef Stalin.
131.211.45.85 20:41, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Jews in the region 

message: Does it really need both AO cats?
Does the Autonomous Oblasts of Russia cat need to exist, since it applies only here?
If it does, why not as a sub-cat of Soviet AO?  Septentrionalis 02:45, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: True. There is only one such entity in this category. Maybe a more general category on the subnational administrative units of Russia is preferable. Then we wouldn't need to change categories every time a unit is upgraded or split off or merged with another one of a different level of self-government. //Big Adamsky 07:18, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Autonomous oblasts

message: I feel the history section is very lacking and side with Russian POV, making it sound like the place was uninhabited and devoid of people and history.  There's no mention of Goguryeo or Jurchens's historical occupation of the area:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Three_Kingdoms_of_Korea_Map.png
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Premongol.png
In Manchu-era the place was part of "East Tartary".  During the Qing Empire era there were many Chinese settlements north of the Amur River, which lasted beyond the Treaty of Beijing and finally destroyed/expelled by Russian forces in 1900.
Through history, the territory had belonged to the Kingdoms of Gojoseon, Sushen, Xianbei, Buyeo, Mohe, Goguryeo, Balhae, Khitan (Liao), Jurchen, Mongol, Qing, etc.  The current article make it sound like the place had little history and was vacant of people.  There's also no mention of the 64 Chinese villages that the Russians destroyed in 1900.
-- Adeptitus 23:52, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  History section and Russian POV 

message: Could anyone direct me to information about the history of the Oblast's flag?  I found one website where a commentor mentioned that the Oblast presumably flew the Soviet flag until the fall of the USSR.  Is this true?  (I am not saying it should be in the article; I just don't know where else to ask this.)  How can I find out when the Oblast began flying the current flag, and what the origins of the flag are?  Was it modeled on the 'diversity flag' (rainbow flag, queer flag etc) or the other way around?  Are the similarities a coincidence?  I would appreciate any pointers abot learning this information. Mathtinder 03:50, 19 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Aaand that link is dead, any chance you can find a replacement somewhere? 46.117.156.222 (talk) 11:35, 26 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Curious about history of flag

message: In Birobidzhan there are two synagogues: One of them is in the capital (there are Subbotniks, too). But where- in wich village or town- is the second Jewish synagogue?
The other synagogue, aside from the Birobidzhan Synagogue, is led by Boris "Dov" Kaufman. Culturalrevival (talk) 20:12, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Synagogues 

message: I didn't really follow this one up, but William R. Siegel Nation Making in Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Oblast: Initial Goals and Surprising Results (cached on Google as  if you want to avoid the PDF) looks like a good source. It's on the site of Deokratizatsiya: Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization. - Jmabel | Talk 22:02, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Potentially useful source 

message: The Shapiro dictionary indicates the gender of געגנט as masculine and explicitly translates Московская область as מאָסקווער געגנט. The use of a feminine form in the Yiddish Wikipedia notwithstanding, the masculine form also appears in the Weinreich and Niborski dictionaries. Given that the Shapiro dictionary is an authoritative source for Soviet Yiddish orthography, I feel it should be used in this article pending the explicit indication of a local source that uses the feminine form. --Futhark|Talk 10:38, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Weinreich's dictionary actually says gegnt can be either masculine or feminine. Don't be thrown off by Moskver gegnt; there is no adjective *moskv. Rather, Yiddish, like German, uses the suffix -er to form indeclinable adjectives of provenance from names of cities and countries (a parallel in German is die Berliner Mundart, where Mundart is feminine; with a real adjective it would be die berlinische Mundart). I did ask at :yi:װיקיפּעדיע:בית מדרש#Grammar question before changing it, and the answer I got from the (presumably native or at least highly fluent) speaker there was that it should be Yidishe Oytonome Gegnt. —Angr 17:51, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The Shapiro dictionary does not offer the feminine alternative, nor am I inferring masculine gender from its illustrational moskver gegnt. It is, however, the standard reference for Soviet Yiddish orthography in its fully mature state, and it has not been adequately demonstrated that the clearly more germanified approach generally adopted by the Yiddish Wikipedia is the more correct alternative in the present context. If you can cite warrant for the feminine form in some source more proximal to Birobidzhan there would be no need for further discussion. The recursive ascription of higher authority to the Wikipedia than to an established preexisting published source otherwise strikes me as counter to one of the Wikipedia's own fundamental editorial tenets (and more than a tad paradoxical). --Futhark|Talk 18:29, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not claiming Yiddish Wikipedia as an authority (until quite recently it had Yidisher Oytonome Gegnt, which is simply ungrammatical), but rather the native or fluent speaker at the help desk as well as the one who changed the name of the Yiddish Wikipedia article. At any rate, I agree a genuine authoritative source needs to be found; do we really know that this is the Yiddish name of the oblast at all? Or do we just assume it because the dictionaries tell us that Yiddish for "Jewish" is yidish, for "autonomous" is oytonom and "oblast" is gegnt? —Angr 18:57, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

text: All of the references that I have seen in Yiddish are either simply to ביראָ־בידזשאַן or to the ביראָבידזשאַנער אויטאָנאָמער געגנט. The most common English term is the Jewish Autonomous Region, usually abbreviated J.A.R. (Why does this article have a hybrid English-Russian title?)  A Russian consular attaché would probably be a useful person to ask about citable references to the current local forms of the name, as well as the preferred form of reference to it in English discourse. --Futhark|Talk 19:27, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: J.A.O. seems to be a common name in English too. Merriam-Webster's Geographical Dictionary lists it as "Jewish Autonomous Oblast", as do Encarta and Britannica. "Region" gets more Google hits, though. (Jewish Autonomous Okrug also gets enough Google hits that I just made a redirect for it.) —Angr 19:41, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The official Web site of the JAR government (using the English form indicated there) is http://www.eao.ru/. Although it doesn't seem to contain anything in Yiddish, a photograph of the sign on the government headquarters is online at http://www.2all.co.il/web/Sites/yiddishproject\15005_(9).jpg. It provides as authoritative a statement of the Yiddish name of the JAR as can be, corroborated by a second administrative sign at http://www.2all.co.il/web/Sites/yiddishproject\15005_(7).jpg, and the text on a local map at http://www.2all.co.il/web/Sites/yiddishproject\15005_(13).jpg. Shapiro confirms the spelling of "autonomous" with tsvey vovn, rather than vov yud, and I have modified the text in the article accordingly. My needing to take a return look at Shapiro to check this revealed that I had misread the gender indication for gegnt. Although I am embarrassed by — and apologize for — the fuss that I kicked up on the basis of that misreading, at least it triggered a successful hunt for the key piece of information. --Futhark|Talk 11:03, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Spelling

message: Is there anything known about the native inhabitants of the region before the Russian came? Who are they, are they extinct? The ethnic groups named under Demographics all seem to not be native to the region. --::Slomox:: >< 22:09, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Native Inhabitants 

message: I've removed the "speculative" figure of 16%, cited to this travel company website, which claims to be quoting from a book.  This figure is so incredibly divergent from every other source it seems most likely the original was 1.6%, and someone just copied something poorly.  This is quite apparently a simple error, rather than "speculation", which could produce a round number like 10% or 20%, but never 16%.  I have not had a chance to look at the original book myself, but neither did the person who added this, so without evidence to the contrary I think this must go.--Pharos (talk) 07:38, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: turns out Jews indeed made up 16% of the population - only it happened in 1939! Since then the Jewish population has declined both in relative and absolute terms. Keverich1 (talk) 00:17, 29 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Non-credible figure for modern Jewish population 

message: There was a movie (Golem) by Amos Gitai in 1992 about this place.  Maybe something should be written about it here?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Abu America (talk • contribs) 08:33, 15 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Golem

message: That section is full of a lot of gibberish.  Someone obviously used a machine translator, and a poor one, to translate a bunch of key Russian phrases, and results are not really parseable as English at all.  It's just nonsensical blather. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont]  ‹(-¿-)› 08:43, 3 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: There's either a problem with your parser or your willingness to parse. It's perfectly parseable even for my non-native parser. What's the problem? --::Slomox:: >< 12:19, 3 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gibberish in "Jewish settlement and development in the region" section 

message: The Demographics section lists percentages taken from 2002 Russian census and cites: Mark Tolts: The Post-Soviet Jewish Population in Russia and the World. Published in: Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe, 2004, No. 1 (52), p. 51.
But the link to the pdf in the citation list is dead and I found this link which is apparently the same document: http://www.jafi.org.il/NR/rdonlyres/EB23392E-5578-4BE4-B13E-C7982AA1B2BB/73879/tolts_jree2004.pdf
Only a text search of the numbers shows no results (page 51 likely means the 15th page of that document, and it does have a paragraph that starts "According to the 2002 Russian census," but I don't see the numbers listed).  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.16.211.3 (talk) 18:11, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Bad Cite?

message: I propose that Autonomous oblasts of Russia be merged into Jewish Autonomous Oblast since it is the only member of this category of Russian entity. At the very least it could be redirected to this article. If another autonomous oblast is created sometime in the future then the "Autonomous oblasts of Russia" article could easily be recreated. 90.200.179.7 (talk) 22:27, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: * Yes there were some others in the past, but they became republics before the Soviet Union collapsed, and therefore they are more appropriately categorised under . However the "Autonomous oblasts of Russia" article mentions only JAO, so assuming that there were no other AO's created and dissolved since December 1991, it would be better to merge the two articles. 90.200.179.235 (talk) 11:48, 8 December 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merger proposal 

message: From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Humanities#Did_Hitler_offer_to_deport_all_the_Jews_in_Occupied_Europe_to_the_Soviet_Union.3F :
:In the German translation of Snyders book the passage refers to a plan of January 1940 to send the 2 million Jews under Nazi rule (i.e. at that time the Jews of Germany and Poland) to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the USSR. This plan is also mentioned here, PDF, p. 18 of 23, based on a newspaper article by Sonja Zekri »Ein neues Madagaskar. Wie Hitler versuchte, Juden in die Sowjetunion umzusiedeln« in Süddeutsche Zeitung of 13 June 2005. A recent newspaper article states that President Medwedjew wants or wanted to attract 2.000 Jewish settlers for the Jewish Autonomous Oblast right now in August, 2013. --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 20:17, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nazi plan 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: "It is one of two official Jewish territories in the world, the other being the state of Israel." Where else could they be? Not mentioning that one of the territories is in Palestine seems unnecessarily biased and ideological, since territory is a geographical not a political term. Regards Keith-264 (talk) 08:24, 5 November 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nomenclature 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Don't know who put the NPOV tag on the article but I've removed it because I can't find any evidence that any rationale for its presence anywhere on this talk page. If someone would like to begin an actual discussion as to why they feel this article is NPOV, feel free to open a discussion that obviously addresses the need for the tag, and your rationale for said tag, and then put the tag back up. Per the tag rules themselves if there is no discussion related to the necessity for the tag, it should be promptly removed. SentientParadox (talk) 08:30, 11 January 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Not my tag, but for the record, the article is clearly not NPOV. It's heavily, and obviously, slanted toward capitalist and Zionist points of view. 174.89.134.106 (talk) 18:06, 13 May 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  NPOV? 

message: The bastardized dual nature of this subsection did not permit me to delete only part of it. Needless to say, a WWII blurb should be re-added, hopefully with something more for references than a Masha Gessen interview on NPR (!). 174.89.134.106 (talk) 18:04, 13 May 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: I think we should remove the last part of this sentence ‘In 1924, the unemployment rate among Jews exceeded 30%, partially as a result of pogroms but also as a result of the policies of the USSR, which prohibited them from being craftspeople and small businessmen’ because I can find nothing about any such anti-Jewish laws in the USSR in Gessen's book or interview. Planetjanet (talk) 18:51, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
replies: text:  See revision. Any better? It's not a specifically anti-Jewish law that Gessen describes, but the intersection of general law and Jewish circumstance. Freelance-frank (talk) 18:53, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Stalin's anti-Jewish purges and World War II" 

message: There should be at least some acknowledgment that many of the sources cited in this article contradict each other. 
One possible explanation is that many people who consider themselves Jewish do not register as such in the official census; "Valery Gurevich, former deputy regional governor and now head of a local Jewish nongovernmental organization, says it’s a convenient spot for Jews to work together with the Chinese. He believes the region’s Jewish population is much higher than the official figure of 1.5 percent: “When emigration to Israel started in the 1990s, three times more Jews left the region than were officially registered in the region,” he says." as quoted in https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/.premium.MAGAZINE-the-other-jewish-homeland-at-the-end-of-the-world-1.5464481
Aliza250 (talk) 07:04, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Post-breakup of the Soviet Union section has contradictory statistics 

message: Another source :  YIVO.  See https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Birobidzhan , https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Birobidzhaner_Shtern , etc.
Aliza250 (talk) 17:11, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  YIVO article 

message: An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect :Yevrey and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 May 4#Yevrey until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion.  Daß Wölf 18:06, 4 May 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Yevrey" listed at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion|Redirects for discussion]] 

message: Before, the main image used to show the city. Now it is a frozen river. It seems the image was puposefully chosen to show the oblast as a cold, unforgiven, unhospitable region. This does not correspond with the population metrics, economic status and so forth. It is the equivalent of showing the sea in the New York article instead of the city, that would never happen. I beseech the image to be changed. 190.195.147.121 (talk) 01:22, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Misleading image 

message: "It is one of two officially Jewish jurisdictions in the world, the other being Israel." But what about Alsace-Moselle? That has Judaism as an official religion. IndianEmperor7 (talk) 20:47, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  There are more officially Jewish jurisdictions