Jewish SSR in Kaliningrad and Israel after the Fall of Communism

It's been posited before that Stalin creates a Yiddish-speaking Jewish SSR in Kaliningrad (which will be what here, Litvinovgrad? Kamenevgrad?) Presumably few Central European survivors wish to move here even if the alternative is Cypriot DP camps, so lets say that its populated by the bulk of the Soviet Ashkenazi population. Probably they are forcibly moved - IOTL Stalin apparently considered forcibly moving Soviet Jewry to Birobidzhan.

Presume that Israel still wins independence and the fall of Communism is roughly OTL (sometime between 1979 and 1999).

What does Jewish emigration politics in the USA, USSR and Israel look like like ITTL?

How do Israel and the Jewish SSR relate to each other during the Cold War? I presume that they deeply distrust each other and view one another as puppets.

What will the former Jewish SSR be called, post-independence? With both Yiddish and Hebrew as sovereign languages and the centers of independent cultures, what is the cultural impact on Western Jewry? The cultural interchange between the two Jewish states themselves?

IOTL Israel, even in large Jewish communities like the US one, has wide currency as the State of the Jews. After the full of Communism, how do two modern, reasonably democratic Jewish states relate to each other?

How much of the population of the Former Jewish SSR moves to Israel? Remember, they get automatic citizenship in a first world country and relatively generous relocation packages. (To help conceptually, what percentage of Moldovans, say, would have moved to the U.S. in the 1990s if offered such a deal?)

Does the remaining Yiddish state remain a close Russian ally like Belarus, or does it attempt to join the EU with the Baltic states? Remember that the most anti-Soviet Jews will already have departed for Israel and elsewhere.

If the Yiddish state does join the EU with the Baltic states, how does the EU's identity change with the early inclusion of a non-Christian state?

How does Israel change with a major late influx of Yiddish, rather than Russian, speaking Jews?

I don’t think anything good would come of it. Like you said, post-communist many, many “Kamenevgrad” Jews will leave for Israel or Germany. I don’t remember if this was the case in Israel but OTL Germany actually had to restrict immigration criteria the influx of ex-Warsaw Pact Jews because they viewed, whether correctly or incorrectly, that they were taking advantage of the welfare system, causing crime and generally being a nuisance.

So in this TL you would get:

1) Influx of ex-Warsaw Pact Jews into Israel and Western Europe at least as much as OTL, causing ethnic tensions and possibly rise of anti-Semitic feelings.

2) Brain-drain on steroids for Jewish SSR (if we assume that most of the population is Jewish then as you pointed out, after the Iron Curtin goes down the entire population can become Israeli or German citizens if they simply get past the border). This results in all sort of economic and political troubles, to put it mildly

3) What shell remains of the Jewish ex-SSR is viewed with distain by West & Israel as a backward Absurdistan. Israeli’s likely view the Jewish ex-SSR and its population the same way F.R.G. view G.D.R. – backward, primitive, Russified and pretenders to “true” Jews/Jewish homeland.

All in all, not pretty

Would they really be Russified though? I'd imagine much less so than OTL. The lingua franca for Soviet Jews in 1945 was still very much Yiddish. So we'd see a secular Yiddish culture - maybe a stagnant, "Sovyetisher" Yiddish culture, but still the descendant of Avraham Goldfaden, Sholom Aleichem and I.B. Singer. The Israelis may ideologically reject the culture of the ghetto, but they can't just reject the immigrants as "lost" Jews ignorant of their heritage. I think the movement of a million (more?) Yiddish-speaking Jews to Israel and the West in the 90's and 2000's would have a profound impact.

Incidentally, if most of the population really does leave, this could be a really interesting case study. What happens to a modern developing country with totally unrestricted outmigration?

Interestingly, IOTL Germany made inmigration of ethnic Jews harder partly because Israel complained when Germany actually became a more popular destination for FSU Jews than Israel in the 2000's. The WZC was concerned that Jews were being "lost" by being settled in lander with small Jewish communities and assimilating within a generation. Israel, OTOH, is ideologically committed to being an open refuge for all Jews - which is what enabled Israel's Jewish population to more than triple in size from 1948-1960. Even OTL Israel took in about one million FSU Jews between 1979 and 2000 or so.

http://www.economist.com/node/10424406

The Economist gives figures of 1 million FSU Jews moving to Israel, 350,000 to the U.S., and 200,000 to Germany, with 800,000 remaining in the FSU. Presumably there would also have been some going to Canada, Australia, the UK, and elsewhere. Playing with these numbers for now, the Jewish SSR would have a projected population of about 2.5 million in 1990, before the fall of Communism.

mikegold said:

Would they really be Russified though? I'd imagine much less so than OTL. The lingua franca for Soviet Jews in 1945 was still very much Yiddish. So we'd see a secular Yiddish culture - maybe a stagnant, "Sovyetisher" Yiddish culture, but still the descendant of Avraham Goldfaden, Sholom Aleichem and I.B. Singer. The Israelis may ideologically reject the culture of the ghetto, but they can't just reject the immigrants as "lost" Jews ignorant of their heritage.

Click to expand...

Ideologically, Israeli’s may not be able to turn down “Jewish brethren” and all that. But would they be happy to receive millions of Eastern European Jews? IIRC, in OTL immigrants from former Eastern Block are in the bottom portion of Israeli society’s totempole.

I think there's a fundamental flaw in this WI, and it's basically that any situation where there was a Jewish SSR would not necessarily recreate the conditions which led to both the collapse of Soviet Marxism and then later the collapse of the union itself.

I see no reason why such a world with a Jewish SSR would have Khruschchev's secret speech, the Hungarian Soviet Revolution, the Brezhnev Reaction and Stagnation, and the Prague Spring, let alone have them unfold in exactly the same manner as they did IOTL. Without these events unfolding as they did IOTL (or suitable analogs), the collapse of Soviet ideology and of the Soviet system is unlikely

EDIT: Furthermore, like the Baltics IOTL, a Jewish SSR in former East Prussia is going to be the Soviet Union's window to the world, so to speak. The Baltic Republics were the ones that benefited the most, economically, from the Soviet system. And unlike the Baltics, they would not have a nationalist mythology constructed based on the "usurpation" of their national sovereignty by the Soviets (let's be frank about the Baltics: they were fascistoid military dictatorships in the interwar, and large portions of the population, urban and peasant, were aligned with the communists, or at the very least willing to work with them to fulfill their own goals.)

Why would a Jewish SSR, even with a collapse in the Soviet system, want to leave? They'd be the least likely to uproot, either to Israel or Western Europe/America, because they'd already have considerable economic interests to stay part of the window to Russian markets, as well as their own developed industries.