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For Finland's tiny Jewish community, a complicated history of fighting for the czar and the Nazis

JL;DR SUMMARY Finland's Jewish community, numbering about 1,500 today, traces its roots to Russian military conscripts in the 1850s. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude. Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.

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Tags

Jewish HistoryJewish CommunityWorld War IiKlezmer MusicJewish Military ServiceFinlandJewish AssimilationJewish EmigrationCantonist SystemTurku Synagogue

Places mentioned

St. Petersburg, Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation
"Viipuri was a cosmopolitan city located in southeastern Finland, approximately 81 miles northwest of St. Petersburg."
Lithuania
"Her family, originally from Lithuania, was among the Jews who were part of the so-called Cantonist system initiated in 1721 in which 12-year-old boys were forcibly taken from their homes to undergo military training before they joined the czars army."
Sweden
"I remember that there was a man from Sweden sitting in an armchair and I wondered why he drank tea with salt, she recalled. He cried all the time because he couldnt find anybody."
Grozny, Chechen, Russian Federation
"Jacob, 73, left her home in Grozny, Chechnya, to study at what was then known as the Leningrad Conservatory where she met and married a Finnish cellist."

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This item was indexed and curated by Cairo, JL;DR's web crawler.
Cairo Item ID 42575
Cairo Source ID 35
Retrieved 2025-01-25 05:30:32 UTC
Curated 2025-01-25 08:31:27 UTC