Departing From the Borderlands: Georgian Jewish Emigration in the Post War-Era

• In Event: The Transnational Making and Remembering of "Russian Jewry"

Abstract

In 1969, a letter signed by eighteen Georgian Jewish families found its way to the United Nations. The message disclosed the perils the families had encountered in applying to immigrate to Israel, but the Soviet state had left their request unanswered, leaving them with no choice but to appeal to entities outside the USSR. This paper argues that a closer examination of the Georgian Jewish community reveals that the mass emigration of Soviet Jews in the late twentieth century was not a unified process, as Georgian Jews largely interpreted their departure through a religious lens as opposed to a nationalist or economic one. I investigate how and why their departure was subsequently incorporated into the nationalist narrative typically transposed upon Soviet Jewish emigration.

Author

• Alexandra Zborovsky, U of Pennsylvania