The Jewish Autonomous Region of Russia, with its capital Birobidzhan, is a territory created by Stalin in the 1920s as a Jewish homeland within the USSR on a barren piece of land on the Russian-Chinese border. The first Jewish homeland of modern time, created twenty years before Israel, it became the unlucky home of tens of thousands of Soviet Jews that were lured there by heavy-handed propaganda. Even Jews from America, France and Palestine embraced this barren place as their Promised Land, although most of these non-Soviet Jews were subsequently executed.

75 years later, the Birobidzhani Jews, having known anti-Semitic purges, frozen climate and economic disaster, left again in a mass exodus. The Jewish Agency, an Israeli government affiliated organisation, provided a free one-way ticket to Israel for any Birobidzhani who could prove their Jewish ancestry. Nearly all the region's Jews have accepted the offer to get out of Birobidzhan.

This photo essay was photographed during the winter of 1998-1999 and documented this last chapter in the story of Jewish Birobidzhan.