Sediari Pope John Paul II disbanded the chair-bearers in 1978. However papal ushers (Italian "Gentiluomo di sua santità") carried him on his death in 2005. Sediari The Sediari pontifici () were chair-bearers of the pope on the sedia gestatoria. Originally servants of the papal household they later became a lay confraternity. The origins of the chair-bearers lie in medieval times, earlier even than the Swiss Guards. The earlier red-dressed papal grooms or palafrenieri were a different group of papal servants, originally liverymen for the papal carriage, then an influential Confraternity, then finally merged with the sediari. The sediari and parafrenieri constituted
Religion in the Soviet Union were traditionally responsible for maintaining synagogues. They created a special Jewish section of the party, whose tasks included propaganda against Jewish clergy and religion. To offset Jewish national and religious aspirations, and to reflect the Jewish national movement's role in the socialist movement of the Russian Empire (for example, Trotsky was first a member of the Jewish Bund, not the Social Democratic Labour Party), an alternative to the Land of Israel was established in 1934. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast, created in 1928 by Stalin, with Birobidzhan in the Russian Far East as its administrative center, was to become a "Soviet