“We Pledge, as if It Was the Highest Sanctum, to Preserve the Memory”: Sovetish Heymland, Facets of Holocaust Commemoration in the Soviet Union and the Cold War

In August 1961, a curious event occurred, referred to by the New York Times as a one-round victory of the Yiddish language “in the struggle with the Kremlin:” ¹ for the first time in thirteen years, and nine years after the Stalinist purge of the Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia, a Yiddish periodical called Sovetish Heymland (Soviet Homeland) appeared in the Soviet Union. A year earlier, editor-to-be Arn Vergelis had written a letter to Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party, requesting the creation of a Yiddish-language periodical to cater to the several hundreds of thousands of Soviet Yiddish-speakers and a potential worldwide readership. From 1961 until 1991, this highbrow political and literary journal would be the monthly, state-sponsored hub of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union. ²