Birobidjan is the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Republic, located in Russia's Far East. It is six time zones from Moscow, just north of the border with China and not far from the Pacific Ocean.

Though migration to the region began in 1928, the Jewish Autonomous Region was officially founded in 1934 as a "homeland" for Soviet Jews. It was the first territorial-administrative entity in the world designated for the Jewish people on the basis of their Jewish nationality.

Given the objectives of the Soviet government at the time, this distant outpost - thousands of miles east of European Russia - seemed a perfect location. more