to populate the Jewish Autonomous Region with Jews occurred as the Kremlin relaxed its grip on Soviet society and permitted a resurgence of Jewish cultural life. Despite this revival, artists and writers were confined by the ideological straightjacket constraining them since the 1930s.   The Yiddish daily newspaper Birobidzhaner shtern was revitalized.   Yiddish once again became an obligatory subject in schools. Nowhere else in the Soviet Union did this occur.   The Jewish Theater expanded its activities and performed plays about the Holocaust.   A Yiddish publishing house was established, which produced literary journals and textbooks in Yiddish.   A Jewish Division of the Historical Museum of the Jewish Autonomous Region opened in 1945.   A synagogue, albeit without a rabbi, opened in September 1947. Jews in Irkutsk donated a Torah scroll, and some 400 to 500 persons attended Rosh Hashanah services that year.