That state is 50,000 km^2; Israel is only 20,000 km^2...
And it has a present-day population of about 6 million as far as I can tell.
I thought it was big enough, but maybe it should be a bit bigger. I dunno.
I guess I misestimated the size, then.
They don't. It just happens to be an easy place to put a Jewish state given the large number of Jews there.
And it's surrounded by Soviet puppets so has little chance of falling out of Soviet influence.
Incidentally, Warsaw is a border town on my map. I thought about putting it in the Jewish state, but then decided that the Polish people probably wouldn't be too happy about that....!
In that case, you could also consider doing one further south, perhaps solving the Lviv problem (is it Polish or Ukrainian?) by making it the capital of the Jewish state; before the Holocaust it had an
enormous Jewish population; depending which census you believe, Jews may have been the plurality. Bessarabia (mostly Moldova these days) also had a large Jewish population; possible the highest in general at the time (as a percent). A state stretching from Lviv to Odessa would probably be 20%+ Jewish before the population transfers, though that's huge and would probably involve a less Jewish state or more population transfers. Of course, the idea of a "national republic" that's not 100% that nationality might appeal to the Soviets.
At any rate, a Jewish thingy in Bessarabia provides a buffer with Romania, which was much less close to Moscow.
And, of course, there's always Crimea, which Stalin actually considered turning into a Jewish SSR (some Zionist Socialists actually got side-tracked there and I think even established a couple kibbutzim).
Reasonable idea, but it means carting millions of people across Siberia to an undeveloped swamp. I hardly think that Jewish leaders would support this.
My proposal involves the Jews staying much closer to where they are, in a developed region which already has a large Jewish population.
Meh. I think the international Zionists would actually support it (though of course the USSR only cares about them somewhat, though they might send a flood of donations like for Zionist settlements in Palestine and then Israel). Plus, it wouldn't involve displacing several million angry Poles, Lithuanians, and Belarusans. I'm sure that Poland would love accepting a flood of refugees, and Lithuania, already quite restive, isn't gonna be thrilled.
If Stalin tells them to get on a train to the ass-end of Siberia, they're going to get on that train. OTL the USSR transferred far more than five and a half million people to all kinds of shitty places.
Huh, I didn't know that. Thanks. In which case, my proposal is realistic!
But I didn't think of it as a giant ghetto-cum-autonomous-oblast. I thought of it as more of a nominally independent state akin to Poland or Czechoslovakia.
I said that it
could become a giant ghetto. It doesn't need to be. Though I do consider an SSR more likely than an independent republic because - why not? Poland and Czechoslovakia were already countries when the USSR dragged them into their sphere. This is more like the Belarusan SSR, a new "state" built on a patch of depopulated land.
Considering the exemplary performance of Jews in all kinds of science and engineering throughout the history of the Soviet Union, there's no compelling reason why the Jewish SSR/Yiddish Republic couldn't end up just as prosperous as the Soviet average, or even better. Or much worse, if Moscow decides to drain them.