it, “the nationalities question in our country has been sufficiently addressed by Comrade Stalin and needs no further amendments.”) But many, especially the Yiddish writers in the committee’s presidium, seem to have felt that they did, in a sense, represent the Jewish people, and that the Jewish people required special consideration because of the national tragedy that had befallen them and because the survivors of that tragedy were their people, their blood relatives. 125 The boldest political initiative that resulted from this sentiment was the February 1944 letter to Stalin, in which the committee leaders Mikhoels, Epstein, and Fefer proposed the creation of a Jewish Soviet Socialist Republic in the Crimea. First, they argued, the Jewish refugees from the Nazi-occupied territories had no homes or families to go back to; second, the creation of national intelligentsias among “fraternal peoples” had rendered the professionals of “Jewish nationality” superfluous; third, the existing Yiddish cultural institutions were too few and too scattered to meet Jewish cultural requirements; and fourth, the war had led to a resurgence of anti-Semitism and, as a reaction to it, Jewish nationalism. The existing Jewish Autonomous Region in the Far East, they concluded, was too remote from the “main Jewish toiling masses” and thus incapable of solving “the administrative and legal problem of the Jewish people” in the spirit of the “Leninist-Stalinist nationalities policy.” 126 The Politburo members Kaganovich, Molotov, and Voroshilov (the first Jewish, the latter two married to Jewish women) seemed cautiously sympathetic, but Stalin did not like the idea and the project died a slow bureaucratic death (despite a brief flare of enthusiasm following the deportation of the Crimean Tatar population to Central Asia and Kazakhstan). The alternative plan of resettling the Jews in the former Republic of Volga Germans appealed to Fefer and Perets Markish as an act of “historical justice” but was vetoed by Molotov as another quixotic attempt to put “an urban nation . . . on a tractor.” The “Jewish problem,” it appeared, could not be solved in the spirit of the Leninist-Stalinist nationalities policy. 127 Disappointing as these reverses may have been, they occurred in the dark recesses of “apparatus” politics and concerned the wartime refugees from the former Pale of Settlement, not their kinsmen in the capitals (Tsaytl’s surviving children, not Hodl’s). Everything changed, however, after the creation of the State of Israel in Palestine. In an attempt to put pressure on Britain and acquire an ally in the Middle East, the Soviet Union had supported a separate Jewish state, supplied Jewish fighters with arms (via Czechoslovakia), and promptly recognized Israel’s independence. It was inside the USSR, however, that the official encouragement of Zionism produced the most striking and—for Soviet