(Jewish Group) Transnistria is a tiny, poor state in E. Europe.The few Jews left there eye an escape

[Behind the Aegis]

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

Officially, this disputed sliver of land between Ukraine and Moldova is called the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic. But to visitors to Transnistria, a breakaway region that declared its independence in the 1990s but which most of the world considers part of Moldova, it looks more like a Soviet state frozen in time.

Communist monuments, long since removed from most everywhere else in the former Soviet Union, remain ubiquitous here. In this capital city, a monument calling for “power to the Soviets” towers over a riverside esplanade. Transnistria is the only place in the world whose national symbol is still the Soviet hammer and sickle. Statues of Lenin and, more controversially, Stalin still decorate city squares. Russian soldiers are everywhere, assuring Moscow of a foothold in the territory of a client state strategically located on Ukraine’s western border.

“It’s just a time machine,” said Larisa Privalskaya, a Jewish academic from Moscow who returned recently from a research trip to investigate the life of a Transnistrian rabbi. “An amazing time machine.”

For tourists motivated enough to obtain a visa, a complicated process that results in a permit granting entry for just a few hours, it can be an exciting place. But for Transnistria’s 458,000 citizens, the twilight zone they call home is a place indelibly marked by the history of political turbulence that has shaped this unique piece of Europe.

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