Jewish Telegraphic Agency - September 2004
Profiles: Birobidzhan Jewish Community
September 23: Long-time residents take pride in the good ol' days
September 21: In former Jewish haven, ground is ripe for revival
September 16: In Birodidzhan, it’s think Yiddish and act Yiddish
September 13: Stalin is long dead, but his Jewish region lives on
Veterans of Russia's Jewish land take lots of pride in the good ol' days
By Sue Fishkoff
BIROBIDZHAN, Russia (JTA) -- Zyama Mikhailovich Geffen came here in 1928, brought by parents fleeing famine and anti-Semitism in Lithuania, hungry Jews desperate to carve out a better future for themselves in the taigas of the Russian Far East.
Fira Moiseyevna Kofman arrived in 1936, a 19-year-old orphan, a freshly minted graduate of Minsk's construction engineers' college, a young idealist eager to build the new Jewish Communist city of Birobidzhan with her own hands.
These two young Jews -- now among the oldest residents of Birobidzhan, which Stalin "created" as a Jewish homeland -- have spent their lives helping the Jewish region flourish. But like many of the region's earliest immigrants, they didn't do it for particularly Jewish reasons.
Geffen's family fled its small shtetl near Vilna, Lithuania, to work at a mill in Kazan, Russia, in 1924.
In 1927, their shul voted on whether to move en masse to the Crimea -- Stalin's first ill-conceived Jewish project -- or head 5,000 miles east to the wilds of the Russian Far East.
East it was, and in February 1928 his father's three brothers were among the first handful of Jewish pioneers to accept the Soviet government's challenge. They pitched tents in the marsh, cleared trees and filled in the swamps.
On New Year's Day 1929, their wives and children joined them, moving into the four first houses. Other Jewish families followed, working the land and owning property in common, much like the early kibbutzim in Israel.
"Those first years we had no tractors or farm equipment," recalls Geffen, who was seven when he arrived. "Everything had to be done by hand. Only tough people stayed, those with strong nerves."
The first tractors arrived in the mid-1930s, a gift from sympathetic American Jews.
The residents of the Waldheim kolkhoz, or collective farm, where Geffen's family settled, came mostly from Lithuania, Latvia and Poland, he says, although there were some Argentines and Americans in the nearby farm collectives.
Waldheim's first school was established in 1929, with one teacher and five desks. All subjects were taught in Yiddish, in keeping with the region's mission of providing a national Jewish homeland.
But Geffen says his family was not ideologically motivated.
"We didn't even think about a 'Jewish' republic then. The main thing for us was to work the land." Cucumbers, tomatoes, cabbage, potatoes, wheat and soy were the main crops, and cattle and pigs were raised.
Although by the late 1930s there was one small synagogue in Birobidzhan, Geffen says the Jews in Waldheim were little interested in Judaism. They celebrated Jewish holidays, but without prayers or religious ritual.
"My grandmother baked matzah until she died in 1949, and on Purim we made hamentashchen. But we didn't keep Shabbas -- we had to work every day."
In 1934, when most of the Jewish agricultural experiments were on the verge of collapse, Stalin gave the Jewish Autonomous Region official status and declared his intention of erecting its capital city, Birobidzhan.
Two years later, Geffen's uncle moved to the city of Birobidzhan from Waldheim to become the caretaker of the first, small synagogue.
That same year, Kofman volunteered with a Komsomol work brigade that set out from Minsk by train to construct the new city.
Nothing about the region's Jewish name motivated her.
"We were young, patriotic, filled with great enthusiasm," she recalls. "We wanted to build something new from the ground up, to help our country."
Kofman spent 20 years laboring for Birobidzhan Construction Company, serving as leader of the company's Komsomol section and veterans' committee. She turned down several Communist Party positions, preferring, she says, to remain a worker.
In 1990, she opened a museum dedicated to the history of the city's construction, filled with photos and artifacts she collected herself from friends, co-workers and company archives.
Unlike the city's official historical museum, which altered its focus after perestroika to reflect Russia's new political correctness, Kofman's museum unabashedly glorifies the city's Communist past. "We built it all, so we had the right to create a museum and preserve that history," she declares.
Until quite recently, Kofman herself served as the museum's director and sole guide. Visitors had to call ahead and she'd open it for them, pointing out her friends and late husband among the portraits gracing its walls.
She has been wheelchair bound for three years, but is as feisty as ever, with a deep, raspy voice that she uses at full volume.
"That's from years of speaking over construction," she explains.
She was recently reelected as head of the company's veterans' association, a job she carries out by phone, working from her bedroom.
Still an unapologetic party member, Kofman says she's ashamed of the current generation's greed and lack of idealism. She describes the 1984 celebrations of Birobidzhan's 50th anniversary, when she marched at the head of the parade and was personally congratulated by party officials.
"Now I can't even look at the celebrations," she grumbles. "When I was young, we lived for others, not for ourselves. We worked from enthusiasm, from a desire to build something, not for money."
Geffen, too, bemoans many of the changes that have taken place over the last 15 years. Waldheim disbanded as a collective more than 10 years ago and is now a joint stockholders' company.
Some of the farm equipment was parceled out in lieu of final salaries; the rest of it "disappeared," he says.
But both of them bristle at the suggestion that Birobidzhan was a "failed experiment," as it is often called in the Western media.
"Why would you say that?" queries Geffen, sitting in his flower-filled courtyard. Pointing to the freshly painted cottages that line Waldheim's leafy main street, their front yards filled with crops and plump cows, he looks hurt. "And look at Birobidzhan, at the changes they made there. It's a beautiful city now."
Indeed, Birobidzhan's physical structure reflects its economic prosperity, although much of it is because of the 50 percent increase in the GNP since 2000.
The wide, tree-lined boulevards are swept clean regularly. In the city center, fresh bricks have been laid down on the sidewalks, and the facades of the stores and residential buildings are nicely painted.
There's an energy in the streets, unlike the depressive atmosphere that prevails in much of post-Soviet Russia.
All of Geffen's children and grandchildren have stayed nearby, although he has one sister-in-law in Israel. Kofman's children, however, have left. In fact, three of her five grandchildren live in Israel.
She doesn't admit it, but it's easy to see in her face that she wishes they had stayed.
"I saw this city grow from the taiga and the mosquitos to the city you see today," Kofman says with pride, spreading her strong, large-boned arms in front of her. "And we did it with our own hands."
return to top
In Stalin's former Jewish haven, locals say ground is ripe for revival
By Sue Fishkoff
BIROBIDZHAN, Russia (JTA) -- Valery Gurevich, the deputy governor of the Jewish Autonomous Region here, slams down the phone and turns to his assistant.
"We need to find a helicopter for Berel Lazar," he shouts, referring to Chabad's chief rabbi of Russia, who is expected the next day to dedicate Birobidzhan's new synagogue. "He needs to get back to Moscow before Shabbat, and says he can't stay for the meeting with the governor."
Gurevich is particularly incensed because the government had already switched all the official celebrations of the autonomous region's 70th anniversary from Saturday, Sept. 11, to Friday -- at Lazar's request.
That level of concern for, and knowledge of traditional Jewish observance might be expected among government officials in New York. But it's rare in Russia -- except in Birobidzhan, the capital city of the Jewish Autonomous Region -- where Jewish sensibilities are deeply engrained.
And although Gurevich wants Lazar at the governor's meeting for political reasons, it's also personally important to him that the country's most powerful Jewish religious leader give the hechsher, or seal of approval, to the city's new synagogue. And that's not just because the regional government contributed $112,000 toward building costs.
Gurevich, like many of the region's elected officials, is Jewish. Unlike some of his colleagues, though, he's truly interested in developing the region's Jewish identity from a carefully preserved memorial to a bygone era into a living Jewish community.
In 1934, Stalin established the autonomous region in Russia's Far East as a secular Jewish homeland to divert Soviet Jews from Palestine.
In the early years, Yiddish culture flourished here, attracting more than 40,000 Jews from all over the world.
In 1936, Stalin's initial purges shrank the region's Jewish leadership. In 1948-49 -- two decades later than in the rest of the USSR -- the Yiddish schools were closed, the theater was shut down and many actors executed, and the state library's extensive Judaica section was burned.
Today, locals believe, there's a real chance that a thriving Jewish community could be established in Birobidzhan. Although the city's Jewish population -- depleted by the large aliyah wave of the 1990s -- hovers somewhere between 2,000-6,000 out of a total population of 80,000, the region's economic prosperity, combined with its Yiddish heritage, help create rich soil for a Jewish future.
Not a great one, perhaps, but one that may survive.
There's still great confusion, however, between Birobidzhan's Yiddish heritage, which is linguistic and cultural, and the Jewish practice that rabbis and foreign Jewish organizations are trying to encourage.
"We call this a Jewish religious community, even though it's not really religious," says Elena Belyaeva, a 30-year-old teacher of Yiddish and Hebrew who, although not Jewish herself, is a leading light in the city's Jewish revival.
That label is in part for tax purposes, she points out, as religious organizations in Russia are beneficiaries of tax breaks. But it's also a conscious effort to remind local Jews that what holds them together above all is their religion, she adds.
In post-Soviet Russia, the turning point from Jewish cultural community to Jewish religious community usually comes when a synagogue is built or returned to the local Jewish population, and a rabbi -- most often a Chabad rabbi -- shows up to lead services.
That's what happened two years ago in Birobidzhan, with the arrival from Israel of Chabad emissaries Rabbi Mordechai and Esther Scheiner.
Scheiner says he and his wife didn't choose Birobidzhan because of its Yiddish heritage. Instead, he says, "We go where we're needed."
Now they're here for good, bringing up their five children in a small apartment a few blocks from the synagogue and Jewish center. And while they're ecstatic about the newly opened shul, a beautiful building which attracted a big crowd to its first Friday night services, the Scheiners say they face political pressure from the leadership of the local Jewish community.
Scheiner has acquired a three-story building for a Jewish day school, and has signed up 108 families, but did not receive official permission to open this fall. He used to get a crowd for services at his home, but people stopped coming.
"There was pressure somehow," he says. "They told me, when there's a synagogue we'll come, but not to your house."
The leader of Birobidzhan's Jewish community declined an interview with JTA.
The synagogue, Scheiner points out, belongs to the entire community, not just to him -- perhaps that's why the local Jewish communal leadership prefers to have religious life concentrated there.
Scheiner's troubles with the local Jewish communal leadership are greater than those reported by other Chabad rabbis in eastern Russia, perhaps because of the region's Jewish past.
"The Jewish population in Birobidzhan is different than elsewhere in Siberia," explains Belyaeva, the Yiddish and Hebrew teacher.
She spent most of the summer researching an exhibit on Birobidzhan's early history in honor of a delegation from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee that visited Sept. 7, the day the exhibit opened, to inaugurate the city's first kosher soup kitchen.
"In Siberia, they were sent there forcibly. The Jewish communities of Irkutsk, of Novosibirsk, developed around one or two prominent Jewish families with rich Jewish backgrounds. They became religious communities.
"But Birobidzhan was built by artisans and craftspeople, who arrived in a mass, voluntary migration."
One might compare it to early Jewish immigration to New York, she suggests.
Jewish practice was never emphasized by Birobidzhan's Jews, Belyaeva continues. But even after the last synagogue burned down in the 1950s, years after the Yiddish schools and cultural institutions were closed in 1948, Jews in the region continued to mark Jewish holidays, and the older people remembered their Yiddish.
Jewish cultural life was revived in Birobidzhan much earlier than elsewhere in the Soviet Union, with the opening of Yiddish theaters in the 1970s. Yiddish and Jewish traditions have been required components in all public schools for almost 15 years, taught not as Jewish exotica but as part of the region's national heritage.
Ritual life was something different, however. During the last 40 years of the Soviet era it was limited to a handful of older Jews who met twice a year -- at Passover and during the High Holidays.
Dov Kofman, 55, joined them in 1983, moving with them in 1986 to their current synagogue -- a small wooden hut on the outskirts of town. For 10 years they shared their building with half a dozen females, who follow a kind of Seventh-day Adventist religion that considers Saturday the day of rest.
Kofman's group, supported by Russia's former chief rabbi, Adolf Shayevich, and by the JDC, has been overshadowed by the much larger, officially recognized Jewish community.
"This is the first time Birobidzhan has had a prosperous Jewish community," the autonomous region's governor, Nikolai Volkov, told the JDC delegation. "And if Rabbi Scheiner ever needs a minyan, I'll be the 10th man."
Lazar, Russia's chief rabbi, is less enthusiastic about Birobidzhan's Yiddish heritage. He draws a distinction between that history and authentic Judaism, which he believes is not represented by weekly Yiddish sections in newspapers.
As he heads to the unveiling of the city's new Sholem Aleichem statue on Sept. 10, Lazar remarks that he considers the synagogue opening scheduled later that day to be much more significant.
"Sholem Aleichem is going back 70 years, to the idea of creating a 'Jewish' Autonomous Region without mentioning who Jews are and where we come from," he says. "The synagogue opening shows that Jews without a synagogue are rootless. Jews survive because of the synagogue."
This article was made possible, in part, by support from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, the Joseph and Harvey Meyerhoff Family Charitable Funds and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
return to top
In Stalin’s ex-Jewish homeland, it’s think Yiddish and act Yiddish
By Sue Fishkoff
BIROBIDZHAN, Russia (JTA) -- Sholem Aleichem never set foot in Birobidzhan — until now.
A 20-foot-tall statue of the Yiddish writer was unveiled last Friday in front in front of the Hotel Vostok in the capital city of this area that Stalin designated as a Jewish homeland.
The unveiling was part of celebrations marking the dedication of a new Jewish community building, containing a Chabad-sponsored synagogue and a kosher soup kitchen, donated by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
Sholem Aleichem now stands watch over it all, seated in his bronze chair on — where else — Sholem Aleichem Street.
“Sholem Aleichem is not just a name, it’s how we greet each other in public,” declared Gov. Nikolai Volkov at the unveiling ceremony. “His work reflects the life of the Jewish people in the shtetl — the tears and the joy, the search for happiness. He’s become part of our Russian culture.”
Birobidzhan arguably is the only place in the world where Yiddish culture and language is a living part of a non-Jewish community’s sense of self. Fewer than 5 percent of the city’s 80,000 residents are Jewish, but Yiddish is everywhere — and now increasingly is joined by Hebrew.
Yiddish has been an integral part of life in the Jewish Autonomous Region since Jews started moving there in 1928 at Stalin’s urging.
Eager to deflect the Jewish intelligentsia from immigrating to Palestine, Stalin posited this swampy, windswept territory 5,000 miles east of Moscow as an alternative national homeland after earlier attempts to resettle Soviet Jews in Ukraine and Crimea failed.
The first Jewish arrivals settled the land, establishing collective farms along the lines of the first kibbutzim in Palestine. But unlike Israel, where the revival of Hebrew was key, Yiddish was declared the second national language of the autonomous region, along with Russian. More than 100 Yiddish schools flourished, along with theater, music, literature and journalism.
In 1949, Stalin’s anti-Jewish purges were in full swing. Birobidzhan’s cultural and political elite disappeared into the camps or were shot. The Yiddish schools, theater, library and synagogues were shut down or destroyed.
In the 1960s, the first Yiddish theater reappeared in the capital city. It was joined by a second in 1977, and Yiddish again became part of the public school curriculum in the early 1980s.
But the generation that came of age in the 1950s and 1960s lost out.
Yosef Brenner, a city council member and CEO of a metal factory, says his father used to attend the city’s last remaining synagogue before it burned down in the 1950s.
Brenner learned Yiddish by hearing his grandmother speak it to his parents.
“Things were different in Birobidzhan,” he says. “When I graduated from school in 1965, I had a strong sense of being Jewish. We didn’t have Jewish religion, but we had Jewish culture.”
That meant, he says, everything from a weekly Yiddish program on the radio to matzah on Passover and family dinners every Shabbat — without the ritual components, he emphasizes.
Today, the city’s 14 public schools must teach Yiddish and Jewish tradition. But most of them do a perfunctory job, says Lilia Valyevich, a music teacher in the Menora kindergarten.
That’s why, she says, Menora was created in 1991. It is a public school that offers a half-day Yiddish and Jewish curriculum for those parents who choose it. About half the school’s 120 pupils are enrolled in the Yiddish course.
Many of them continue on to Public School No. 2, which offers the same half-day Yiddish/Jewish curriculum from first through 12th grade.
What’s striking about these two public schools is that many of the students are not Jewish.
Yiddish also is offered at Birobidzhan’s Pedagogical Institute, one of the only university-level Yiddish courses in the country. Elena Belyaeva, 30, teaches Yiddish there, a language she has studied for 10 years, including a six-week intensive course in New York in 1997. She also teaches Hebrew, which she studied for a year in Jerusalem.
Like most of her students, Elena is not Jewish. But she’s a central force in the local Jewish community, and has a wealth of information about the region’s cultural history. Her bookshelves are crammed with Yiddish books, and she spent her summer putting together an exhibition of Birobidzhan’s early history for the newly-opened Jewish center.
“I grew up thinking it’s quite normal to walk around with a big Star of David around your neck,” she says. “In Moscow they tell you to hide it, but here people of all nationalities have always felt free to express their identity.”
This semester, Belyaeva has eight young women in her first-year Yiddish class. Only Anastasia Cherevataya, 19, claims even a Jewish grandparent, but she says that had no bearing on her interest in the language.
“He understands Yiddish, but has forgotten how to speak it,” she says, adding that her parents aren’t happy she’s chosen to study Yiddish. “They think English would be more useful.”
Anna Kozireva, 19, said she chose Yiddish over French for her second foreign language because Yiddish seemed more exotic. “I like the alphabet,” she remarks.
“I think it’s important to know Yiddish in Birobidzhan,” says Katherine Bondarenko, also 19. “I live in the Jewish Autonomous Region, and I want to know about Jewish traditions. It’s an emotional connection, a part of my history.”
This article was made possible, in part, by support from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, the Joseph and Harvey Meyerhoff Family Charitable Funds and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
return to top
Stalin has long been dead, but his Jewish region lives on
By Sue Fishkoff
BIROBIDZHAN, Russia (JTA) -- The odd story of Stalin's Russian homeland for the Jews has taken another strange twist.
The ribbon-cutting ceremony at the two-story Moorish-style synagogue in Birobidzhan last Friday was the highlight of a weeklong celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Jewish Autonomous Region, an area in Russia's Far East that Stalin declared a secular Jewish homeland in 1934 to divert Soviet Jews from Palestine.
The festivities in Birobidzhan were punctuated by Yiddish and Russian singing and dancing performances.
The synagogue opening, one of three such openings in Russia's Far East last week, followed the unveiling of a bronze statue of Sholem Aleichem on the city's main boulevard, Sholem Aleichem Street.
And what's particularly noteworthy about these projects are the unusual funding arrangements. Rival Jewish groups combined forces, as did regional Russian governments.
In addition to local donors, funding came from the Rohr Family Foundation -- a major donor to Chabad activities in the former Soviet Union.
Indeed, the synagogue in Birobidzhan, as well the two others that also opened last week, put Chabad's stamp on the Russian Far East, solidifying the movement's position as the leading Jewish religious organization in the former Soviet Union.
Chabad's chief rabbi in Russia, Berel Lazar, flew in from Moscow on a private plane specially chartered for the occasion, hopping from city to city across the region, cutting ribbons and delivering speeches at each shul opening.
The three ceremonies mark, he said, "an even greater achievement," referring to what he called the "victory over the darkness of communism."
On Sept. 8, a 100-year-old synagogue building in Vladivostok, used for many years as a chocolate factory, was formally returned by the government to the local Jewish community, headed by Chabad Rabbi Menachem Raskin.
The next day in Khabarovsk, an elegant $3 million synagogue building was opened, and the day after that, Birobidzhan's shul opened its doors. Additional funding for the projects came from a group often at odds with Chabad in the former Soviet Union, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which sent a delegation to the region in advance of the synagogue openings.
Money for the Birobidzhan and Khabarovsk projects also came from regional governments, unheard of elsewhere in Russia.
The Khabarovsk regional government underwrote half the building costs for that city's new shul, and Birobidzhan's regional government contributed 10 percent of construction costs for the $715,000 synagogue.
The deputy chairman of the Jewish Autonomous Region, or JAR, Valery Gurevich, was careful to point out that his government's contribution, which came through the Ministry of Culture, was technically given to the building's community center rather than the synagogue, and should be seen as cultural rather than religious support.
The synagogue opening in Birobidzhan was attended by a star-studded roster of the region's political leadership, many of whom, including the city's mayor, are themselves Jewish.
"Today we're opening the region's first kosher synagogue," said Gov. Nikolai Volkov, as he greeted 200 spectators outside the just-painted synagogue building last Friday. "That says a lot. The JAR is a national region, and now the Jews can develop their own culture."
Volkov chose his words carefully. On the surface, Birobidzhan, population 80,000, is laden with Jewish trappings.
Yiddish is everywhere: on store signs, on every official government document, in the local newspaper -- even at the train station, Yiddish writing is the first thing visitors see when they arrive in the city.
But the linguistic clues are remnants of a deliberate attempt by the Soviet State in the 1930s to subvert Zionism and Jewish religious life by, on one hand, pouring money and political support into this tiny "Jewish national homeland" 5,000 miles and seven times zones east of Moscow, while on the other hand ruthlessly stamping out Hebrew and discouraging Jewish ritual observance.
In the early years of the region's existence, Yiddish theater, music, dance and literature flourished here.
More than 40,000 Jews from all over the world, including Argentina, the United States and even Palestine, answered Stalin's call to escape urban squalor and create a "New Socialist Jew," working the land in collectivist fraternity.
Propaganda posters from the 1930s and early 1940s are remarkably similar to Zionist posters from the same era, exhorting Diaspora Jewry to help build "Palestine" -- but in Russia.
Unlike Palestine, however, Birobidzhan's experiment in making farmers out of ghetto Jews failed. Just a handful of collective farms survived more than a year or two before the newly arrived Jewish population migrated to the growing capital city of Birobidzhan.
In 1936 Stalin's purges thinned the ranks of the region's Jewish leadership.
In 1948-1949 the Yiddish schools were closed, the theater was shut down and many actors executed, and the state library's extensive Judaica section was burned.
The last functioning synagogue was destroyed in a mysterious fire in the 1950s. But Yiddish was too deeply embedded in the popular consciousness to disappear entirely.
Although by 1970 Jews represented 6 percent of the population, their influence greatly outstripped their number.
After Stalin died, Jewish life grew more public as the decades passed.
But once the doors of the Soviet Union opened in 1989, 10,000 of Birobidzhan's estimated 12,000 Jews immigrated to Israel, the highest aliyah rate in the country.
Aliyah continues today, says Jewish Agency for Israel representative Alona Goldenberg, with about 100 Jews expected to leave for Israel this year.
But in a phenomenon noted throughout the former Soviet Union, the Jewish population of the region grows even as more Jews leave.
Jewish Agency figures place the current number at 2,000, although local Jewish community officials insist it is closer to 6,000.
The leading local newspaper, the Birobidzhaner Shtern, resumed publishing a Yiddish section more than a decade ago.
Yiddish and Jewish culture and traditions are taught as part of the curriculum in one of the city's public schools, which any child may attend.
The local Jewish community, part of the Chabad-affiliated Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, sponsors the usual offering of classes and clubs in Hebrew, Jewish and Israeli subjects, and religious life received a boost two years ago with the arrival of Chabad emissaries Rabbi Mordechai Sheiner and his wife, Esther.
Sheiner serves as the rabbi of the city's official Jewish community -- the synagogue project was undertaken on his initiative -- although a small group of mostly elderly Jews connected with one of Russia's two chief rabbis Adolf Shayevich, continues to pray in a small wooden building on the outskirts of town.
Locals say they see nothing unusual about non-Jewish children's dance troupes performing the hora to Israeli music in the city square, and they don't consider it a particularly Jewish activity.
"Dancing and singing has always been a part of our life here," says 30-year-old Yelena Belyaeva, a non-Jewish woman who teaches Yiddish and Hebrew in the local teacher's college and for the Jewish Agency.
The difference is, she notes, that Israeli and Hebrew culture have been added into the mix. "The Hebrew songs and dances we've only had since perestroika. Before that, it was just Yiddish."
This article is part of a series of pieces on Jewish life in the former Soviet Union. This series was made possible, in part, by support from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foufndation, the Joseph and Harvey Meyerhoff Family Charitable Funds and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
return to top
Home About Mission Links Interns Kehilla Statistics Donations Search Contact
2020 K Street, NW, Suite 7800,
Washington, D.C. 20006
Phone:
(202) 898-2500 Fax:
(202) 898-0822
Email: ncsj@ncsj.org
Web site:
www.ncsj.org