The hero of the Soviet Union’s most popular animated series was an adorable but mysterious “beast of unknown origin” named Cheburashka. To Maya Balakirsky Katz, Cheburashka’s rootlessness, his inability to fit into bureaucratic classification systems—in an early episode he is rejected by the zoo since its staff doesn’t know which cage to put him in—and even the fact that he resembles but most definitely is not a bear (the symbol of Russia), all suggest that he is a symbolic Jew. Such an interpretation becomes more persuasive given the men behind the cartoon:
[T]he series’ creative team was made up almost entirely of Yiddish-speaking Jews who had lost their families and homes in the [Holocaust]. The director, Roman Kachanov, . . . was born in a poor Jewish neighborhood in the city of Smolensk and pursued boxing in the cultural atmosphere of Smolensk’s Labor Zionist movement before his father and sister were murdered point-blank at a nearby execution site. Cheburashka’s puppet designer, Lev Shvartsman, raised in the Zionist youth culture of Minsk, changed his name to “Israel” after the 1967 war despite official hostility toward the Jewish state.
Kachanov recruited Teodor Bunimovich, a [Jewish] photojournalist who recorded many frontline documentaries of Nazi atrocities in Belarus, as his cameraman. The series’ operator Iosif Golomb not only spoke fluent Yiddish but his father was an avid collector of ḥasidic music. . . . [I]t stands to reason that the myriad rejections that Cheburashka endures as a consequence of his “unknown origins” resonated [with the creators] on a personal level. . . .
Cheburashka’s mysterious origins provide one of the central intrigues of the series. . . . The first episode opens with a fruit vendor opening up a crate of oranges and finding an adorable cross between a brown bear and an imported orange. . . . Not coincidently, Israel was the main source of orange imports to the Soviet Union. More to the point, Jaffa oranges were the signature export of the Jewish state. Indeed, Jaffa oranges were the only product that the Soviet Union imported from Israel and were the source of both national pride, representing productive Jewish labor in a country of their own, and, for Soviet Jews, anxiety as the ultimate symbol of Zionism.
Read more on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/260892/cheburashka-soviet-animation