American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee


American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, also known as Joint or JDC, is a Jewish relief organization based in New York City. The organisation has supported Jewish people living in Israel and throughout the world since 1914, and is active in more than 70 countries.
The JDC offers aid to Jewish populations in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in the Middle East, through a network of social and community assistance programs. In addition, the JDC contributes millions of dollars in disaster relief and development assistance to non-Jewish communities.

Mission

The JDC has a four-pronged mission:
  • Rescue of Jews at risk. JDC's expertise is crisis response. JDC works with local partner agencies to address immediate needs.
  • Relief for Jews in need. In addition to emergency aid, JDC support builds the capacity of local agencies to sustain and enhance quality of life for struggling communities.
  • Renewal of Jewish community life.
  • Israel JDC works in partnership with the Israeli government and other local organizations to improve the lives of the elderly, immigrants, children at risk, the disabled, and the chronically unemployed. In 2007, the JDC was awarded the Israel Prize for its lifetime achievements and special contribution to society and the State of Israel.

    Leadership

The organisation was led by Moses A. Leavitt until his death in 1965, and was succeeded by Charles H. Jordan. Jordan died in Prague in 1967, which was declared a suicide by the Czechoslovak government, in the context of communist denouncements of the JDC at the time, The New York Times reported his death as mysterious. Czechoslovak defector Josef Frolík advised the Central Intelligence Agency in 1974 that Jordan had been abducted by Palestinian agents and died during interrogation at the Egyptian embassy in Prague.

History

The JDC was founded in 1914, initially to provide assistance to Jews living in Palestine under the rule of the Ottoman Empire.
The organization began its efforts to save Jews with a donation of $50,000 from Jacob Schiff, a wealthy Jewish entrepreneur and philanthropist. He was the main funder of the organization and helped raise money to aid and save Jews around the world. Additionally, the American Jewish Relief Committee helped collect funds for the JDC. Several wealthy, Reform Jews founded the American Jewish Relief Committee on October 25, 1914. Schiff was one of these men, along with Louis Marshall, the president of the committee, and Felix M. Warburg. The Central Relief Committee, founded on October 4, 1914, also helped provide funds to the JDC. Eastern European Orthodox Jews, such as Leon Kamaiky, founded this organization.
Almost one year later, in August 1915, the socialist People's Relief Committee, headed by Meyer London, joined in to provide funds to the committee. After a few years, the JDC and the organizations assisting it had raised significant funds and were able to make a noteworthy impact. The charity had transferred $76,000 to Romania, $1,532,300 to Galicia, $2,5532,000 to Russia, and $3,000,000 to German-occupied Poland and Lithuania by the end of 1917. The JDC had sent nearly $5,000,000 to assist the Jews in Poland by 1920. During the emergency relief period, the JDC had disbursed over $22,000,000 to help in restoration and relief across Europe, between 1919 and 1920.
Approximately 59,000 Jews were living in the land of Israel under Ottoman rule by 1914. The Yishuv was largely made up of Jews that had emigrated from Europe and were largely dependent on sources abroad for their income. The outbreak of World War I destroyed those channels, leaving the community isolated and destitute. With disaster looming, the Yishuvs leaders appealed to Henry Morgenthau, Sr., then the U.S. ambassador to Turkey. Morgenthau was moved and appalled by the misery he witnessed, and sent an urgent cable to New York-based Jewish philanthropist Jacob Schiff, requesting $50,000 of aid to keep them from starvation and death.
Dated August 31, 1914, the Western Union cablegram read, in part:
PALESTINIAN JEWS FACING TERRIBLE CRISIS... BELLIGERENT COUNTRIES STOPPING THEIR ASSISTANCE... SERIOUS DESTRUCTION THREATENS THRIVING COLONIES... FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS NEEDED.
The plea found concerned ears in the U.S. A month later, $50,000 was raised through the efforts of what was intended to be an ad hoc and temporary collective of three existing religious and secular Jewish organizations: the American Jewish Relief Committee, the Central Committee for the Relief of Jews Suffering Through the War, and People's Relief Committee.
A greater crisis arose in 1915 when the Jewish communities of the Pale of Settlement in Russia became caught up in the fighting along the Eastern Front. Under the leadership of Judah Magnes, the Committee was able to raise another five million dollars by the end of the year. Following the Russian Civil War, the Committee was one of only two organizations left in America sending aid to combat the Russian famine of 1921–1922.
File:World War I Hungarian Prisoner of War Card.jpg|thumb|right|Card issued to a Hungarian prisoner of war by the Vladivostok branch of the Joint Distribution Committee of the American Funds for Jewish War Sufferers, 1920
The Joint Distribution Committee finances programs to assist impoverished Jews in the former Soviet Union, Central and Eastern Europe, providing food, medicine, home care, and other critical aid to elderly Jews and children in need. The JDC also enables small Jewish populations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia to maintain essential social services and help ensure a Jewish future for their youth and posterity. In Israel, JDC responds to crisis-related needs while helping to improve services to the elderly, children and youth, new immigrants, the disabled, and other vulnerable populations.
In the spirit of tikkun olam, a Hebrew phrase used by social justice activists to refer to a moral responsibility to repair the world and alleviate suffering, the JDC has contributed funding and expertise in humanitarian crises such as the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, Cyclone Nargis, the Darfur genocide, the escalating violence in Georgia and the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.

Agro-Joint

The Soviet government wanted to control the JDC in the 1920s and how it was working with the Jews living in the Soviet Union. The JDC had agreed to work with an organization known as the Jewish Public Committee, which was controlled by the Bolsheviks. By agreeing to do this, the JDC was able to assist Jews, while being supervised by the Bolsheviks, which appeased the Soviet Union.
World War I plunged Eastern Europe into chaos and subjected Jewish communities across the region to intense poverty, famine, and inflamed anti-Semitism. The October Revolution and other subsequent conflicts fanned the flames further, and pleas for JDC's humanitarian intervention increased. Consequently, the Soviet Union allowed the JDC to work with the American Relief Aid, instead of the Jewish Public Committee, in order to help those living in famine. This went on from 1921 to 1923, and during this time the JDC and ARA were able to use nearly $4 million to feed 2 million people in both Belarus and Ukraine.
The JDC went further to improve conditions for the Jews living in Ukraine by bringing 86 tractors from America to Ukraine. They used these tractors to help reconstruct Jewish agricultural colonies. Many of these colonies in which Jews were living had been destroyed during the war, and were not of optimal living conditions. Furthermore, Dr Joseph A. Rosen, the director of the Russian branch of the JDC, devised a plan to further assist Jews living in shtetls, Jewish towns where the majority of the population speaks Yiddish.
The communist leadership outlawed businesses upon which Jews were largely dependent, forcing families into poverty. All of these acts lead the creation of the American Jewish Joint Agricultural Corporation in 1924. JDC appointed a New York lawyer, James N. Rosenberg, to head its European Executive Council and oversee Agro-Joint operations. He was later named President of the American Society for Jewish Farm Settlements in Russia, Inc.
One innovation was the establishment of loan kassas, cooperative credit institutions that issued low interest loans to Jewish craftsmen and small business owners. The capital from kassa loans helped revitalize villages and towns throughout Eastern Europe between 1924 until 1938.
With the support of the Soviet government, JDC pushed forward an initiative to settle so-called "nonproductive" Jews as farmers on vast agricultural settlements in Ukraine, Crimea, and Belarus, as well as an attempt to grant Jewish autonomy in Crimea. A special public organization, the Society for Settling Toiling Jews on the Land, or OZET, was established in the Soviet Union for this purpose, and functioned from 1925 to 1938. There was also a special government committee createdp, called Komzet, whose function was to contribute and distribute the land for the Jewish collective farms, and to work jointly with OZET. The United States delivered updated agricultural equipment to the Jewish colonies in the USSR. The JDC also had agronomists teach the Jewish colonists how to do agricultural work. This helped over 150,00 Jews and improved over 250 settlements. The number of Jewish peasants was greatly reduced because unemployment was down and the colonies were more successful.
Agro-Joint was also active, during these years, in helping with the resettlement of refugee Jewish doctors from Germany.
The success of the Agro-Joint initiative would turn tragic just two years later. Joseph Stalin's government had grown increasingly hostile to foreign organizations. Agro-Joint workers soon became targets of the Great Purge under the mass operations of the NKVD. Operational Order No. 00439, entitled "On the Arrest of German Subjects Suspected of Espionage against the USSR" was issued on July 25, 1937, and mandated the arrest of current and former German citizens who had taken up Soviet citizenship. Later in the year, the order was expanded to include others suspected of collaborating or spying for Germany. Agro-Joint workers, and the doctors it had helped to resettle, became targets. Many of those who assisted in Agro-Joint, including its 17 staff, were arrested and accused of espionage and counterrevolutionary activities, and were killed.
All of the settlers who had not already fled were killed by the Nazis in 1941.