Like carve out a place between Russia, Belarus and Ukraine in the former Pale of Settlement. Establish a bunch of Yiddish language schools there. Have it become a center of Jewish culture. Sure, there are already Ukrainians, Russians and Belorussians there but there were already people in the far east too.

  • TrashCompact [none/use name]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Honestly the idea of forcibly relocating Ukrainians from a relatively small part of their country and giving that land to Jews seems like a terrifying idea for how the former group would retaliate. Fascism was already popular in Ukraine and they manage to go on chanting "Jews will not replace us" today, despite their country having a relatively small Jewish population.

    • Anemasta [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Supposedly the South Ukraine and Crimea were the original plan.

      The location that was initially considered in the early 1920s was Crimea, which already had a significant Jewish population.[18] Two Jewish districts (raiony) were formed in Crimea and three in south Ukraine.[22][24] However, an alternative scheme, perceived as more advantageous, was put into practice.[18]

      • cilantrofellow [any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        The settlement of The eastern frontier was always paramount. The JAO was an extremely underpopulated area right on the borders of China and where many royalist a had run to before. Not the right time or right place to designate for survivors of genocide nonetheless.

        However, if Bessarabia and Odessa had been designated for the already considerable Jewish populations, in tandem with the deportations of multi-national populations derived from Catherine’s colonization efforts (inviting Scandinavians, Germans, Greeks, Poles, etc to displace Tatars), I think it would have been more successful. Odessa was one of the most Jewish metropolises in the world alongside New York, and only when they could in the 80s did they leave Ukraine for Israel or the US, largely because of economic stagnation and the weird anti-Semitic messaging Brezhnev seemed to be propping up when pushing against Ukrainian nationalists.

    • emizeko [they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      today, despite their country having a relatively small Jewish population.

      I wonder how it got so small

      • sooper_dooper_roofer [none/use name]
        ·
        2 years ago

        idk about Ukraine but the Jewish population in Germany was always pretty small, which is one of the key reasons they were able to do the holocaust.

        • AcidSmiley [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Ukraine had a fairly large Jewish population before the holocaust. I think out of the 6 million Jews murdered during the shoa, 800,000 were Ukrainian, which is the second largest contingent after the Polish (2 million) IIRC.