Noble Guard (Vatican) of Hereditary Standard-Bearer, who was responsible for carrying the standard of the Catholic Church. After 1870, the Noble Guard, now reduced to a force of fewer than 70 men, performed mainly ceremonial duties as an honor guard. Guardsmen most commonly appeared in public when the pope presided over ceremonies in Saint Peter's Basilica. When the pope was carried in the sedia gestatoria, Noble Guards walked alongside the papal chair. During the hours reserved for papal audiences, guardsmen also stood in the antechamber of the papal apartments and, on formal occasions, on either side of the papal throne. During the Second
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