NOVOKATOVSK, Transnistria (JTA) — In this tiny, hardscrabble village that could easily be mistaken for the fictional Anatevka in “Fiddler on the Roof,” farmer Or Cohen, 35, lives with his wife, Anya, and their 3-year-old son Adam, in a 100-year-old house built of clay.

In the backyard, Cohen raises chickens and turkeys, and grows vegetables, while Anya, 31, works remotely for an Israeli startup developing online platforms for genetic testing. For extra income, they’ve fixed up a guest room to accommodate the occasional tourist adventurous enough to end up in this outpost of civilization less than 300 meters (yards) from the Ukrainian border.

“Just a few nights ago, we could hear the Russians bombing Odesa, and on the Telegram app, we saw they were ordering people into shelters,” said Cohen, a former taxi driver in Israel who has the Hebrew word “emet” (truth) tattooed into his right forearm. “But we have no fear here.”

Cohen is the only Jew in Novokatovsk, itself half an hour’s drive east of Tiraspol, capital of the self-declared “Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic.” This breakaway region of Moldova, known to the rest of the world as Transnistria, is home to about 465,000 people — down 35% from the 706,000 who lived there in 1990, one year before the Soviet Union fell apart.

Yet the USSR still lives on here in Transnistria. Statues of Lenin and Stalin dominate the main square of Tiraspol, as does a Soviet T-34 tank prominently displayed on a pedestal. Enormous red stars line Pokrovskaya Street across from the Alexander Suvorov Monument, named after the Russian general who founded Tiraspol in 1792.

In fact, Transnistria — which means “beyond the Dniester” — is the world’s only entity whose national coat of arms includes the hammer and sickle. It’s so communist that half a dozen travel agencies in Moldova’s capital, Chisinău, offer “Back in the USSR” day trips to see this sliver of Marxist nostalgia wedged between the Dniester River to the west and Ukraine to the east.

“I find it really safe to live here,” Cohen said. “At night, we don’t lock the doors of our house. But I realize it’s not for everyone.”

Before 1939, Rhode Island-sized Transnistria was home to around 300,000 Jews. But after Nazi troops occupied the area in July 1941, they began carrying out mass executions — not only of local Jews but also those who had previously fled Bessarabia from the advancing Germans.

Today, only 2,000 Jews live here as defined by Israel’s Law of Return — which requires at least one Jewish grandparent — including the........

© The Times of Israel