From Tel Avi to Tel Aviv: Georgian Jewish Emigration from the USSR 1967-1972 by Alexandra (Sasha) Zborovsky
In the final decades of the twentieth century, over one million Jews emigrated from the former Soviet Union and resettled across Israel, the United States, and Germany. They came from the urban centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg, the Ukrainian cities of Odesa and Kyiv, and Bukharian centers across Central Asia. Georgian Jews, despite comprising 2.5 percent of the USSR’s Jewish population, accounted for as many as one-third of Jewish emigres from the USSR in the first years of this emigration. In fact, Georgia had the highest rate of Jewish emigration of any Soviet republic between 1968 and 1972. This talk investigates the idiosyncrasies of Georgian-Jewish life, what circumstances inspired them to emigrate, and why their experiences have been overlooked in broader histories of Soviet Jewry.
About the Speaker:
Alexandra (Sasha) Zborovsky is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation project “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Jewish Repatriation, Family Reunification, and Emigration from the USSR” investigates how and why, in the last three decades of the twentieth century, more than one million Jews circumvented the USSR’s—and eventually post-Soviet states’—autocratic restrictions on emigration, permanently leaving the self-proclaimed socialist paradise. Her work has been supported by the Association for Slavic East European and Eurasian Studies, the Open Society Archives, the Center for Jewish History, and the American Academy for Jewish Research.
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