Chapter 2 Town on Fire

Countries of Origin of Immigration to Palestine

The main countries of origin of Jewish immigration in the 1920s were the USSR and Poland. As we can see from figures 2.1 and 2.2, until 1923, most immigrants to Palestine set out from the territory of the Soviet Union (primarily Ukraine), but from 1924 on, the share from the USSR dropped and that of Poland increased.

Until 1923, about half the immigrants (46.4 percent) came from the Soviet Union and about 30 percent from Poland. In 1924–1931, the trend reversed, with 50 percent coming from Poland and only 19 percent from the USSR. Over the decade, more than 70 percent of immigrants came to Palestine from these two countries. Therefore, to understand the motivations for immigration to Palestine, we must look at what was happening in Ukraine, Bolshevik Russia, and Poland in the 1920s.

Because the statistics compiled by the Aliya Department regard Ukraine as an integral part of the Soviet Union, it is hard to estimate the number of Jews who went to Palestine due to the civil war in Ukraine. According to the book Eretz Yisrael bi-Shnat Tarpag (Palestine in 1922/23), between June 1922 and March 1923, 7,943 Jewish immigrants arrived in Palestine. Of these, 2,651 were from the USSR, a third of them (651) from Ukraine.3 Presumably, during and shortly after the civil war, Jews from Ukraine constituted more than a third of those going to Palestine from the Soviet Union. Indeed, a report by the Palestine Office in Constantinople notes that in the seven months from June to December 1920, approximately three thousand people were sent to Palestine, and from December 1920 to May 1921, the aliya committee sent another twelve hundred. The statistical distribution of immigrants in the six months from December 1920 to May 1921 indicates that more than half (55%) of the Jewish immigrants to Palestine were from Ukraine; 17 percent were from Bessarabia; and smaller percentages came from the Caucasus, Lithuania, Crimea, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, and elsewhere. Some 69 percent were male, and 31 percent were female. In the second half of 1921 (July–December), the percentage of immigrants from Ukraine rose to 80 percent; only 11 percent were from Bessarabia. During that time, 65 percent of the immigrants were male, and 35 percent were female; 11 percent were children under ten.4 From these data, even though they are not continuous, we can assume that more than half of the immigrants who went from the USSR to Palestine between 1919 and 1923 were from Ukraine.

Ukraine

With generous largesse of freedom and deliberate lies

You sneaked Cossacks’ horses into synagogues.

You raped and slaughtered my daughters before their fathers’ rheumy eyes,

Mothers—hanged with their suckling babes from railway pylons.

Thus shall set the sun upon you: like a head, tumbling from the sword,

While all the victims lie in your red-dyed rivers, O daughter of Ukraine!

Broken limbs dance a-sway in macabre conflagrations: “Save us, Lord!”

Your drunkards’ blades are drawn from rivers of blood and charred remains.

Your temple’s incense bears the stench of Torah scrolls torched;

The sunflowers in your land have an ochre hue, like plague survivors’ skin,

While the raking of your sheaves reaps bones.

The hand of fate was dealt long since.

The inferno is part of your nature innate . . .

Until your redemption comes from the heaps of defeat,

Those judging you, Shabbos goyim, over fine bread altercate . . .

Destined are all sins to come home to roost.

They will be welcome!5

Ukraine was the main country of origin of Jewish migration during the early 1920s. It was a bloody country whose Jewish citizens were slaughtered in scores of brutal pogroms during the Ukrainian civil war from 1917 to 1920. The pogroms were the result of the chaos and political anarchy that prevailed in the territory of the crumbling czarist empire after the fall of Czar Nicholas II. In October 1917, the Bolsheviks overthrew the nine-month-old democratic provisional government headed by Alexander Kerensky. The fall of Kerensky, the dissolution of the Duma (legislative assembly), the establishment of workers’ councils (“soviets”) that would govern the country, and the signing of a peace accord with Germany that led to the withdrawal of Russia from World War I made the Bolsheviks many enemies. These enemies disagreed with the Bolsheviks ideologically and opposed the way they had seized power.

The political changes did not pass Ukraine by. The Central Council of Ukraine (Rada) was formed in April 1917. At first it made only modest national demands, but after a while it sought to secede from Russia and achieve full Ukrainian independence. The fight for independence began. In June–July 1917, the Ukrainian General Military Committee was established, headed by the nationalist Symon Petliura, and the first Ukrainian battalions were created. On November 7, the Rada proclaimed the Ukrainian People’s Republic, and a few months later, it issued the First Universal (manifesto) for the Ukrainian people. “The Russian Provisional Government,” said the Universal, “rejected all of our demands; it refused the outstretched hand of the Ukrainian people. . . . If the Russian Provisional Government cannot introduce order in our land . . . we must undertake it ourselves. . . . Therefore we . . . declare that from now on we shall build our own life.”6 The next day, the Rada declared Ukrainian independence and the severance of any connection with Russia. The Bolsheviks responded by invading Ukraine. On January 26, 1918, they captured Kiev and the Rada fled to Zhitomir. Ukraine—especially the three districts of Kiev, Volhynia, and Podolia—became killing fields. Cities were captured and abandoned, and the conquering and retreating troops left behind a trail of destruction and ruin.

An assortment of soldiers from various armies and with opposing interests fought each other and became integral parts of the Ukrainian landscape during the civil war: Ukrainian nationalists headed by Petliura, battalions of partisans who had formed alliances with Petliura and then joined or betrayed him, Red Army troops, Polish soldiers who had joined Petliura, Germans who were first allies and later enemies of the Ukrainians, White Army troops under the command of General Anton Denikin, and locals who joined whoever was fighting the Bolsheviks. The only thing that united all these forces was their hatred of the Jews and a desire to hurt them.7 Forty percent of the pogroms were carried out by Petliura’s forces and his allies, 25 percent by local farmers and gangs, 17 percent by Denikin’s White Army, 10 percent by the Polish army and Grigoriev’s troops, and 8 percent by the Soviets.8

Sometime in 1920, Lucien Wolf, one of the leaders of English Jewry, received a detailed, thirty-one-page report on the violence in Ukraine. According to the report, the bloodbath there was not like the familiar pogroms from the distant or recent past; the events were unprecedented in scope and intensity. “The events now taking place in Ukraine cannot in any sense be understood as mere ‘pogrom excesses’ which the Jewish people had to live through so often in its long history. It is necessary to open one’s eyes to the fact that during the last two years the Jewish population of the Ukraine is being exterminated systematically, persistently and evidently with a firm determination of utterly destroying this branch of the Jewish people.”9

The language the report’s author chose to use leaves no doubt that they considered the violence in Ukraine unprecedented in its brutality and believed that the murderers’ intent went beyond random killings of Jews. The anonymous author stressed that the aim of the pogroms was systematic, consistent liquidation of Ukrainian Jewry—an attempt to thoroughly wipe out this segment of the Jewish people. The conceptual world of the report seems to be drawn or copied from the Holocaust. Were it not for its date and historical context, one might assume it was written amid the annihilation of European Jewry during World War II.

The number of people murdered in the pogroms is a matter of historiographical controversy. As early as the 1920s, several attempts were made to estimate the number of shtetls destroyed and the number of Jews murdered, which ranges from conservative estimates of 30,000 to much higher figures of 250,000. A Red Cross report published in the early 1920s estimated that 30,500 Jews had been murdered.10 However, Elias Heifetz, who served as chair of the All-Ukrainian Aid Committee that operated under the auspices of the Red Cross, argued in his book on the slaughter of Ukrainian Jewry that the number murdered was much greater than that. According to him, the report did not consider Jews in small villages; Jews who had fled their homes and been murdered in the forests, on the roads, and at train stations; Jews thrown overboard from ships into the rivers of Ukraine; or those who had died of starvation and illness. Heifetz estimates that 120,000 people were killed in the pogroms.11 Eliezer David Rosenthal, author of Megilat ha-Tevah (Scroll of slaughter), estimated that a quarter of a million people were murdered. “Of the 124 cities and towns in the Kiev Governorate in which Jews had lived before the war, between 85 and 90 were wiped out. In the many villages where Jews had lived in the Kiev Governorate, almost the entire Jewish population has been wiped out. Of the half million Jews, 200,000 were killed by the sword of the Petliuras, the Denikins, and the various hetmans, who multiplied like truffles and mushrooms. One hundred fifty thousand were killed and slaughtered and 50,000 died of starvation, cold, and various infectious diseases.”12

Estimates published in 1928 by the scholar Nahum Gergel were more conservative than those of Heifetz and Rosenthal. In an article titled “Di Pogromen in Ukrayne in di Yarn 1918–1921” (The pogroms in Ukraine in 1918–1921), Gergel took a different tack in estimating the number of murder victims and determining the geographical pattern of the pogroms and the identity of the murderers. His article was based on 688 cities and towns in which roughly fourteen hundred pogroms took place; according to his conservative estimates, fifty thousand to sixty thousand Jews—twice the number given in the Red Cross report—were murdered.13 According to Gergel’s research, thirty-five thousand victims had been murdered in the actual pogroms and fifteen thousand at train stations, on trains, and on roads; in addition, there were victims who had been severely wounded in the pogroms and died in the days and weeks that followed.14 The number of people injured was around the same as the number murdered; thus, the total killed and wounded came to about one hundred thousand.15

Table 2.1 shows that the pogroms followed a distinctly regional pattern. In some regions of Ukraine, there were relatively few pogroms, whereas in other regions, there was a bloodbath, with tens of thousands losing their lives. More than 70 percent of the pogroms took place in the three governorates of Volhynia, Podolia, and Kiev, which passed from hand to hand in the civil war and were beset by political instability. Of the victims, 53.3 percent (16,569 Jews) were killed in the Kiev Governorate, 26.1 percent (8,111) in the Podolia Governorate, 8.7 percent (2,693) in the Kherson Governorate, and 6.2 percent (1,952) in the Volhynia Governorate.

Source: Gergel, “Di Pogromen in Ukrayne,” 112.

Although the Bolsheviks, Ukrainian nationalists, farmers, partisans, and Denikin’s White Army troops fought one another, they also took advantage of the prevailing chaos to plunder, attack, and slaughter the Jews. The occupying troops and those retreating from the Volhynia, Podolia, and Kiev Governorates wreaked massive destruction. The Jews were the first to pay the price of the war and anarchy. Many shtetls suffered more than one pogrom.16

The attackers showed no mercy; they killed whoever was in their path, young or old. Ten percent of those murdered were children, ranging from just a few months old to age fifteen; 12 percent were aged sixteen to twenty; 50 percent were aged twenty-one to fifty; and 26 percent were aged fifty and over.17 The mass murder of the Ukrainian Jews was preceded by sadistic acts of abuse by both the soldiers and the local population. Contemporary reports published at the time and testimonies taken from the survivors stress repeatedly that for the perpetrators it was not enough to just murder Jews and steal their property; they tortured them to death viciously and mercilessly. “What typified the acts of the volunteer troops was severe, vicious torture,” wrote Joseph Schechtman. “For the rioters it was not enough to spill blood and maim; they intended especially to torture and afflict.”18 In Megilat ha-Tevah, Rosenthal described a long list of particularly brutal pogroms. The following are just a few examples:

In Makarov [Kiev Governorate] there were a few thousand Jews before the pogroms. The whole shtetl was wiped out. Now the entire population is Christian. I found only three Jewish families there, and even that is a wonder. The sicarii fought the Jews of Makarov “with sword and fire,” annihilated the men, smashed the women’s bellies, and impaled the children on stakes. The Petliuran Cossacks stripped the Jews of their clothes and dragged them naked in the snow: they roasted the Jews “in their own juices”: They locked them in their homes, set fire to the houses, and posted guards to make sure the victims would not escape. A delegation of seventeen old people were sent to plead with the hetman for the lives of the Jewish residents of the town. The hetman gave a signal. His companions quickly fell upon the delegates and carved them up with their swords like cabbage. All that remained was a heap of pieces of meat and bone.19

In Zhitomir there were three pogroms, each one more vicious and violent than the last. The first two were in January and March 1919; the third was in June 1920.20 The attackers not only destroyed and plundered the Jewish community but first abused some four hundred Jews before murdering them:

The Cossacks broke into the homes, barged into the basements, dragged the Jews who fell into their hands, and killed them mercilessly. The Cossacks took seven Jews out of the hospital to the Teterov River, where they shot them to death. . . . The river rocks the . . . Jews in its waves. . . . In the cemetery, the room of the dead, rows and rows of chopped-up bodies are piled up. The victims’ relatives walk past together to identify the slain. Burial must wait; that was the order. Meanwhile, a repulsive odor from the slaughtered corpses spreads through the city. The bad smell lasted eight days. . . . In the cemetery lie young women with smashed bellies, their breasts chopped off. Corpses are piled up on each other—columns of heads, bodies. . . . Next to the bodies of the parents lie the bodies of their small children. On a Kiev street Slibordsky saw a live child suckling from the breasts of his dead mother.21

In Dubova, eight hundred local Jews were brutally tortured and murdered. “Before the eyes of the Jewish blacksmiths they cut off the head of pregnant young Esther Dinstein. Her black head, combed and adorned with little combs over the ears, rolled along the street amidst the garbage and the dust. Next to her rolled the fetus, whom the murderers had removed from her split belly and thrown to one another like a rubber ball.”22 In Boguslav, in the Kiev Governorate, the murderers seized a young woman “in order to violate her, and when she gathered all her strength to save herself from them they cut her to pieces. One old man was beaten in the head until his brain spilled out and was eaten by dogs. There was a woman about to give birth whose husband was killed by the Cossacks in front of her; they didn’t touch her—so that she would watch in hopeless desperation. A thirteen-year-old girl was violated by four Cossacks one after another.”23

In the middle of February 1919, a pogrom broke out in the city of Proskurov; fifteen hundred Jews were murdered. The Cossacks split up into small groups and spread out over the streets where the Jews lived. They broke into their homes and slaughtered everyone in their way. The attackers made no distinction between women and men or between young and old. “They cut their victims with swords and stabbed them with spears. They shot to death only those who managed to escape outside. Then they showered the fugitives with lots of bullets until they had used them up. When the Jews found out about the slaughter being perpetrated in the city by the haidamaks, they started to seek refuge, hiding in attics and basements. But the Cossacks crawled into the attics and dragged out the people hiding, and they threw bombs into the basements.”24

One characteristic of the Ukrainian pogroms was the rape of Jewish women on a scale the Jews had never seen before. The pogroms in 1881 and 1882 had involved mainly robbery, looting, and destruction; in the Kishinev pogrom, testimonies tell about the rape of women. In the pogroms from 1904 to 1906, approximately three thousand Jews were murdered, and many Jewish women were sexually assaulted and raped.25 But the pogroms during the Ukrainian civil war were known for their brutality. Jewish women were raped and tortured by all the armies fighting in the civil war:

A special place in the pogroms perpetrated by the volunteer troops is occupied by rapists of women. In none of the previous pogroms were women raped in such large numbers and with such atrocious brutality. There was not a single pogrom in which the rioting volunteers did not defile Jewish women. In some towns absolutely all the women, young and old, were raped. The age of the women—whether extremely elderly or tender girls—was no barrier to the monsters. Some, turning themselves into brute animals and depraving themselves, would rape a sixty-year-old woman and on the same occasion defile a ten-year-old girl. Sometimes they raped a mother and her daughter and granddaughter side by side. They raped them right in front of their husbands, fathers, and brothers. Anyone who tried to protect the poor wretches paid with his life. There were many cases of gang rape: a few dozen soldiers and Cossacks would violate one woman, and afterwards either they would kill the unfortunate soul or she would die from the torment or go crazy.26

There is no way to estimate the number of women who were raped, but reports and chronicles from that period contain scores of testimonies about the subject. Alter Druyanov devoted the third volume of the journal Reshumot to the pogroms and included many testimonies about rape and assaults on women. The following are just a few of them:

On July 28—reports S. S., a 28-year-old widow and factory worker—Cossacks started coming into our yard and they all robbed and stole. One of the Russian neighbors had warned us Jewish women in the courtyard that the Cossacks were planning to come at night to violate [us], so all the women fled; only I couldn’t leave my home because my son had German measles. A widow with a sick child, poor and downtrodden—I believed I would arouse the compassion of those brutes and I stayed home. At night three Cossacks burst into my room, broke and destroyed all my things, took the most valuable objects, and then raped me. . . . All my pleas not to hurt me were in vain. In vain I kissed their hands, cried, sobbed. . . . They violated me, tortured me, and defiled me.27

On October 17—recounts David Chernobelsky—the steamship Vilna approached the port in the city of Verkhnedneprovsk (Yekaterinoslav Governorate). At midnight six men boarded the ship and demanded a ransom of 12,000 rubles from the passengers. The passengers collected this sum and gave it to those demanding it. At two a.m. about twenty armed men boarded the ship, took all the men off the ship, lowered them to the shore, stripped them of their clothes, and left them only in underpants. While stripping them of their clothes, they beat the people they were robbing, and when they found gold teeth in their mouths they yanked them out. When they had finished their work with the men, they put the eighteen young Jewish women who were on the ship on shore and raped them all, torturing them brutally. They carried out this outrage before all our eyes. The abuse and rape continued until noon.28

On July 28—reports G. R. of Kremenchug—armed, mounted Cossacks entered our yard, demanded money, and took all the money that my son-in-law and I had. . . . At night eight Cossacks—including two officers—broke into our home, searched our entire house, and took everything they found. While doing so they beat me, my son-in-law, and my fifteen-year-old son with their horsewhips. They stripped my son of his clothes and took them. After they took the things, they raped my two married daughters, one nineteen years old and pregnant and the other twenty-one, holding her sick baby in her arms. When my daughters started asking the cruel rapists to have mercy on them, the Cossacks threatened to hang them. Whips at the ready, they put them in a room and locked the door. . . . They wounded me with a sword and beat my son-in-law senseless.29

In his article “Antishemiut u-Fera’ot” (Antisemitism and pogroms), published in Reshumot, Schechtman states that he has lists of women who were raped but adds that he cannot determine their number, since “most of the poor souls hide their shame.” Nevertheless, “according to the estimates in our possession, the number raped exceeds ten thousand.” He continues, “The issue of the thousands of women who were raped has become a severe, painful national and psychological problem in Ukraine.”30

These harsh descriptions are a shocking testimony of the hardships and torments suffered by the Jewish community during the civil war. This is a gendered issue that has been addressed little by historians. The rape of Jewish women had far-reaching social and ethical ramifications. Violence against women was part of a broader strategy of harming Jews as a distinct ethnic group in Ukraine. The perpetrators plundered, destroyed, burned, and murdered, but the harm they caused a Jewish man became total only when they desecrated the bodies and psyches of the women in his family. Through these horrific acts, the murderers completed their work. They not only took the Jews’ lives and wiped them out physically but simultaneously defiled the women, thus thoroughly dispossessing and dominating the Jews. Raping Jewish women was a way of not only humiliating, degrading, and shaming the women but also wounding and defeating their husbands and fathers, who were forced to watch helplessly from the side.

The pogroms had fateful consequences for Ukrainian Jewry. Jewish communities that had thrived before the war vanished without a trace. In eighteen out of forty-seven Jewish towns examined in Ukraine, not a single Jew remained. In fourteen others, the Jewish population shrank by 90 percent; in five, by 70 to 90 percent; and in ten, by 20 to 70 percent.31 The damage to property was tremendous. The demographer Jacob Lestschinsky published a series of articles entitled “After the Pogroms in Ukraine” in the American newspaper The Forward, which were translated into Hebrew in the newspaper Kuntres. Lestschinsky wrote, “Of every hundred families, the homes of 28 were burned . . . 79 percent of the shops were looted and only 8 percent of them were burned along with their merchandise. The rioters knew what was in front of them and did their work in an orderly, regimented way, first removing all the merchandise from the shops and only afterwards setting fire to them. The same was done with the whole house.”32 According to Lestschinsky, there was a clear distinction between the looting by Denikin’s and Petliura’s troops and the looting by Ukrainian locals. “The gangs of Denikin or Petliura,” wrote Lestschinsky,

would first completely empty the Jews’ homes of all their money and property and load it in carts. Then the farmers from the vicinity would come and set about their work: they would remove the windows and doors of the house, dismantle the roof, take apart the ovens, and transport the materials to the village. In many towns the following sight was seen: entire streets of roofless houses lacking doors and windows, like big, open holes that resemble open mouths groaning and telling of the people buried within, of the blood clotting on their walls, of the violation of the bodies of tortured sisters.33

In some Ukrainian cities, the Jewish population more than doubled after hundreds of refugees from the villages fled to the big cities: in Odessa the Jewish population rose by 36 percent; in Uman by 40 percent; in Kiev by 216 percent; and in Kharkov by 400 percent—from eleven thousand in 1897 to fifty-five thousand in 1920. In contrast, there were towns in which the local Jewish community shrank dramatically, sometimes even ceasing to exist. In Tetiev, hometown of poet and playwright Ya’akov Orland (whose family’s story appears at the beginning of the book), not a single Jew remained. The same was true of other towns: Bulanovka, Brusilov, Germanovka, Dubova, Dzyunkov, Veselinoya, Zhivotov, and Pyatigory. The survivors, now refugees, migrated to the big cities.

For those who survived, “only one way remains: to flee wherever the wind takes them. Indeed, whoever still has strength in his legs and a desire to live abandons everything in his home and flees to the neighboring countries, Bessarabia and Poland, to save his life.”34 According to Doar Hayom, thirty thousand Jewish refugees reached Constantinople. “The condition of the refugees . . . is dreadful. Until October 15 the French and American Red Cross were supporting twenty thousand refugees at their expense. Now these organizations have terminated their support.”35

The plight of the Jewish refugees was indeed terrible: with no roofs over their heads, no source of livelihood, and a lack of basic living conditions, many went hungry and could barely survive. In Tiraspol, on the east bank of the Dniester in the Kherson Governorate (currently Moldova), large numbers of refugees lived in abominable conditions: “Many children, neglected by their starving parents, wander the streets and run around the garbage bins hoping to find scraps of food.”36 Every day around forty people, mostly children, died. An outbreak of typhus in Odessa killed numerous refugees: “A rather large number of the Jews [in the city] were condemned to starve to death. . . . The entire population is dreadfully filthy. Swarming with parasites. In the absence of sanitary services and amidst constant hunger, epidemic typhus has spread, and thirty to forty people are dying daily.”37 The casualties were buried hastily and in a disorganized manner:

Mortality in Odessa, especially among the Jews, is tremendous. . . . The dead are buried in a large mass grave in the cemetery. Such a grave is approximately 2 meters long, 10 meters wide, and 4 meters deep. . . . They simply bring the deceased to the cemetery, where they are thrown together into the graves in a disorderly manner; [the graves] are barely covered with 50 cm of soil. Bringing the deceased to the cemetery is also very expensive, so sometimes the dead are simply thrown into the street and from there they are later removed to some other place.38

In his article “Antisemitism and Pogroms,” Schechtman discussed the severe consequences of the pogroms for Ukrainian Jewry: “The result was that after the pogroms the survivors found nowhere to return to. They couldn’t even find a place to spend the night.” Those who fled their homes “were left half-naked, with no underwear or clothes, with no pillow, blanket, or bed, no chair to sit on, no rags to plug the holes in the walls, and no oven for heat.” The cold, filth, epidemics, and starvation ravaged the Jews

no less than the rioters’ swords had done. There was nothing to lay the sick on, no way of keeping the infected away from the uninfected. It was impossible to get rid of the lice. For months those who had been robbed had no way to wash themselves with water. There was no medicine because there were no Jewish hospitals (and in the shtetls all the hospitals had been run by Jews); they had been totally destroyed. Medical assistance was also lacking for the most part. If any doctor survived the pogroms, he would quickly flee to the cities for safety. In addition to the illnesses there was hunger. The Jews, having been robbed by the rioters to the point that they had nothing left, could not get the food they needed anywhere. The farmers in the area did not want to sell the necessary food to the plundered Jews, aside from which the Jews had nothing to buy it with.39

In June 1921, the British Mandatory government dispatched Major Morris, the director of the Department of Immigration and Travel, to Europe for a close-up look at the work of the Palestine Offices there and at the profile of the population seeking to immigrate to Palestine. Morris met with the British consuls who issued visas, the heads of the Palestine Offices, and prospective immigrants themselves. In a comprehensive, detailed report that he submitted to Herbert Samuel, Morris discussed the problem of postwar refugees in Europe and the impact of the American quota laws on immigration to Palestine. The refugees’ plight, Morris maintained, might put pressure on the Zionist offices and distort the judgment of the heads of the offices, who were then liable to send undesirable immigrants to Palestine.

America has closed her doors to mass Immigration, which I understand is only the beginning of introducing a system of Immigration by selection; and the American Joint Distribution Committee which has done so much relief work in Eastern Europe, is also closing down for want of funds. Thousands of refugees are pouring into Roumania and Poland from Russia. A Jew’s life in either of these countries, and in the newly occupied Russian territories, is not of the happiest at any time and it is worse if he is a refugee. And so it might be that the situation in Eastern Europe, where so much suffering is endured, may have inspired the sub-offices of the Organization to find an outlet which would afford some relief, morally and spiritually as well as materially.40

Following conversations with many prospective immigrants, Morris stated that “a large number of those examined and rejected” only “a few persons are emigrating from the states of which they are nationals . . . that practically all the immigrants are of Russians origin.” Of seventy migrants whom he interviewed in Berlin, there was not a single German citizen—only Russian prisoners of war and refugees from the war zones in Ukraine, Poland, and Russia. Morris interviewed 150 prospective immigrants in Istanbul and 900 in Vienna, and his conclusion was the same: “Jews frequently told me that the Jew who has a home, and is successful in business, is not going to emigrate except in very small numbers, though he is ready to support the cause. It may therefore be said that it is the Russian Refugee and the unsuccessful business man who is the Immigrant at present. Jews living in more settled countries will not immigrate to Palestine until the country will is given a more permanent and secure character.”41

The refugees’ plight was the main cause of immigration to Palestine in the 1920s, and it can be understood only in the eastern European context of the Ukrainian civil war. Tens of thousands of refugees were knocking on the doors of the Jewish migration societies and Palestine Offices in Europe, seeking to escape to any country that would have them. For them, Palestine became a place of refuge.

Bolshevik Russia

The Jews in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution formed the second-largest Jewish collective in Europe, with 2.7 million people. The 1920s in Communist Russia can be divided into four periods: the civil war and anti-Jewish pogroms; war communism; Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP); and the repeal of the NEP and Stalin’s rise to power. Each of these periods had a destructive impact on the Jews of Russia, ranging from harm to their sources of livelihood and a deepening of poverty to harm to body and soul.

As soon as the Bolsheviks rose to power, while Russia was still in the midst of a civil war, Lenin instituted a socialist economy. The period that followed, known as “war communism,” primarily involved the nationalization of factories, banks, private homes, and workshops with one or more employees; the elimination of private commerce and greater centralization of economic life; the expropriation of agricultural produce from farmers; food rationing; and an egalitarian wage policy.42 The rapid switch to a communal economy with no period of preparation or adjustment led to a dramatic decline in Russian agricultural produce and grievous damage to the various segments of the Russian population. The shortage of food caused severe famine in the cities. In rural areas, farmers might be able to feed their families from the small plot of land they retained, but in the cities, there was hardly any food to be bought. Many factory workers moved to the country, so that by 1921 there were only about half as many of them as in 1917. For want of a policy offering them incentives to go to work, and because of the expropriation of property and political oppression, the Russian people sank into deep poverty and profound despair.

The economic crisis in Soviet Russia did not pass over the Jews either. The unique employment structure of the Jewish population was dealt a severe blow, and many families lost their livelihoods. The impoverishment of the Russian farmers affected Jewish merchants and skilled tradesmen as well because they depended on one another for their income.43 Following the enactment of a regulation requiring the recording and nationalization of merchandise and raw materials, private commerce was banned, and this caused even greater harm. Many Jewish merchants and skilled tradesmen were left with no source of income: their businesses had been nationalized, private commerce had ceased, skilled tradesmen were left without any raw materials, housing conditions in the cities and towns were unbearable, and about 80 percent of Jewish youth were unemployed.44 “All the classes of the Jewish community—the bourgeoisie of the shtetl, the intelligentsia, the petty shopkeepers, the skilled tradesmen, the workers . . . all of them, all are so tormented by hunger that they are getting up and abandoning everything in the shtetl, even their homes, and setting out on the road.”45 News of the severe famine in Russia reached the Jews of Palestine, where the Jewish National Council urged the people of the Yishuv to lend a hand to their starving brethren.

Brothers! Our brothers the Jews of Russia and Ukraine. who were the first to build our land and support the Old and New Yishuv in Palestine, are in trouble. This summer the famine that broke out in the Volga governorates of Soviet Russia reached the governorates of Ukraine and Russia, where the Jewish population lives. The famine is devastating the inhabitants. Thousands of people are wandering the streets asking for bread. Thousands of orphans remain without shelter. The formerly rich are begging for alms. People are dying in the streets with no one to gather them up. . . . The picture is terrible. There are no words to depict the magnitude of the catastrophe.46

Zelig Horwitz, who had moved to Palestine before the crisis in Russia, wrote to the Zionist Executive, describing what had happened to his family in the Crimean Peninsula:

In 1922, my whole family set out for Palestine illegally from the city of Yevpatoria (Crimea, Russia). Unfortunately, however, the Soviet government arrested them and confiscated all their money. They were left “like sheep without a shepherd,” i.e., destitute. Ever since then, their economic situation has grown worse from day to day. I started receiving horrible letters saying that their situation was precarious. . . . In 1923 I received shocking news, news that devastated my whole life here in our land: Due to the famine in Crimea, Russia, my 20-year-old brother, a student at the university in Simferopol, had died. . . . The letters that I received from home were filled with requests, screams, and pleas for me to take at least one of them from Russia.47

In early 1921, Lenin adopted the NEP to repair the damage caused by war communism and especially to appease the starving farmers who had risen up against him. He reestablished commerce, restored the workshops, and revitalized industry and agriculture, making it possible to buy food and raw materials again. Russian farmers no longer had to hand over their produce to the state; they could sell it on the private market. Opportunities were created for private enterprise in commerce and industry, and workers who had fled to the villages returned to the cities. But despite the NEP, the regime retained ownership of heavy industry and natural resources, imports and exports remained in the hands of the state, and the war on the urban bourgeoisie continued. In mid-1923, high taxes were imposed on merchants and skilled tradesmen, again impoverishing the Jewish population.48

In his book Ha-Yehudim be-Rusya ha-Sovietit (The Jews in Soviet Russia), Lestschinsky describes the history of one Jewish family in Vitebsk during the period of the NEP to understand in depth the economic crisis that befell Russian Jewry. “I encountered this eyewitness in 1924 in Riga, where he had fled for his life, and I wrote down his story almost word for word.”49 This is the story of a Jewish shopkeeper. “I have never been rich, but we earned enough to live on. My wife, three sons, and I got by. Thus the days passed until 1918. Since then we have been plagued by misfortune and calamity—calamities that will apparently never end.” From the moment the Bolsheviks started enforcing the NEP, his family’s economic status suffered:

The Bolsheviks started instituting new rules. One fine morning, I found a lock on the door to my shop. All the shopkeepers found similar locks on the doors to their shops. They recorded the merchandise, took it, and gave me a “receipt.” My wife still keeps this receipt sewn in her dress. . . . They took away all my merchandise. Others had known a few days in advance that their merchandise would be seized, so they had taken precautions: some buried it in a basement; some hid it in the attic. But I didn’t regret that at all, because after three shopkeepers were shot for hiding merchandise, all the others, embarrassed and heartbroken, quickly turned in their merchandise to the Sovnarkhoz (National Economic Council).50

With no income, the family lived on the food they had stored up, hoping the situation would soon improve. “After all, it can’t be that everyone will die of starvation. A month passes, two months pass, three months—but it doesn’t end.” A black market developed, with the Jews taking part. “I hear Jews are starting to engage in commerce a bit. Chaim, the leather merchant, obtained soles somewhere and is selling them under the edges of his kapote. So-and-so goes to Moscow. He takes sugar and tobacco there and comes back with manufactured goods and locks.”51 But the Cheka—the Soviet secret police—followed the merchants and smugglers. They “stopped the Moscow train a few versts before the city and were going to shake out and search. . . . Toward evening, they brought in a large group of prisoners. They had found ‘Czarist’ money sewn in hidden places that would escape even the eye of the devil. . . . Plunder consisting of a few manufactured carts and other goods fell into the hands of the Cheka.” Lestschinsky summed up the Vitebsk shopkeeper’s story: “Unfortunately, it is impossible to recount the entire story here. . . . [He] sees terrifying sights, horrors, and miracles, stumbles and is caught a few times, and survives until he finally escapes to Riga. We wanted in particular to describe the atmosphere in which the vast majority of the Jewish community lived for a few successive years. In this atmosphere they lived and fought hard just to have bread to eat.”52

Zionist activists and Hebrew teachers were also persecuted by the Bolshevik government by means of the Yevsektsia—the Jewish section of the Communist Party.53 In 1919, Yevsektsia members took over the Zionist parties’ headquarters, arrested their members, and shut down their newspapers. The Hebrew language was deemed reactionary and was officially banned. Publication of Hebrew periodicals and books ceased, and libraries were taken over or closed. Teachers and students of Hebrew were put on trial and imprisoned. In March 1925, Yardeni Berman (a dentist), Yechezkel Kopper (a pharmacist), and three other Jews from Palestine applied for an immigration certificate from the Aliya Department for David Rozin, thirty-five years old, and his fourteen-year-old son Zevulun. They lived in Soviet Russia, and David had been persecuted for teaching Hebrew and heading the local branch of the Zionist movement.

The above, a Hebrew teacher by profession, was chairman of the local branch of the Zionist Organization in this city for many years and was known to the people of the district for his dedicated work teaching the language and disseminating Zionism. In the past two years he has been jailed several times by the Soviet authorities; he was in prison in the cities of Starokonstantinov and Shepetovka, and recently he has been under special observation by the GPU [Soviet secret police]. In addition, according to the latest reports that we have received from the people of the aforementioned city, he is in danger of being exiled to Siberia.54

War communism and the NEP that followed brought about the total ruination of Russian society. Dan Pines eloquently described the bleak situation of Russian Jewry after the Bolshevik Revolution. “The economic politics of the USSR are detrimental to the Jewish masses,” wrote Pines.

The development of cooperation in manufacturing, consumer affairs, and services, the high taxes in the city and countryside . . . the disenfranchisement of broad segments of the population due to their nonworking past, which brings along with it the denial of many other rights as well, the abolition of private commerce and industry, the policy for the development of heavy industry, the nationalization . . . the purging of officials, the trade unions, the parading of new people with proletarian lineage, the barring of immigration, the persecution of religion, of the national movement, and of the non-Communist labor movement, the shortage of raw materials needed by the various branches of manufacturing and industry, all these are bringing about the atrophy and diminution of hundreds of thousands of Jews from all social classes.55

Oppression and economic hardship intensified the push factors, and many people sought to emigrate. At first this meant internal migration to regions not under Bolshevik rule, but afterward they started trying to immigrate to the United States and Palestine: “Jews would risk their lives running for the borders in those years. On one side the Cheka would shoot, and on the other side Romanian soldiers or Polish soldiers would. Nevertheless, there were about seventy-three thousand Jews in Bessarabia alone who had sneaked across the border. Even greater was the number of fugitives who fled for their lives to Poland. Some two hundred thousand Jews left Russia over the course of three years (1918–1921). ‘Left Russia’—now it is easy to put these words together. But it is a uniquely horrific episode in the sufferings of the Jews.”56

As the Bolshevik regime consolidated its hold on the country, it became less possible to emigrate. Jews encountered bureaucratic and other difficulties that prevented them from leaving. Russia, the main country of origin of Jewish emigration since the 1880s, restricted emigration in the second half of the 1920s. Poland took over as the main country of origin, a position it held until the outbreak of World War II.

Poland

As in Ukraine and Bolshevik Russia, the lot of the Jews in Poland worsened in the 1920s. Polish Jewry was the largest Jewish collective in Europe following World War I and the second-largest in the world after American Jewry. Three million Jews lived there in the 1920s, accounting for about 10 percent of the total Polish population. Between the world wars, Poland was a backward agricultural country; two-thirds of its population lived in villages and worked in agriculture. Polish farmers had small plots of land that barely supported them, and the poverty of most of the rural population was a burden on the country’s economy. Poland was trapped in a vicious cycle that kept it from prospering: The extreme poverty in the rural areas directly affected markets in the cities and increased unemployment countrywide. The high unemployment rate drove down wages in industry and crafts and reduced the purchasing power of workers. Consequently, prices of agricultural produce were low, harming Polish farmers.

Unemployment in Poland in the 1920s made the poverty and economic hardship worse. Many Polish farm workers were unemployed. In industry, too, the unemployment rate was high. In June 1926, for example, there were 1,302 applicants for every hundred new jobs. The number of people out of work exceeded 300,000, whereas there were only about 35,000 jobs available.57 Like the Russian economy, the Polish economy was centralized and subject to government oversight. The state controlled 70 percent of the iron industry, 25 percent of the coal industry, and 20 percent of the gas and oil industries as well as the production of electricity and the wood industry. The government controlled most of the banks, and in the absence of private capital and enterprise, Poland was dependent on foreign capital. In 1931, Poland’s debts exceeded ten billion zloty, while the annual state budget was estimated at 2.5 billion zloty.

The centralized nature of the Polish economy and the way it was run were detrimental to the Jews due to their unique occupational structure. Two-thirds of the Jews lived in cities, and their way of life was completely different from that of rural Poles. Agriculture, the mainstay of the economy for the non-Jewish population, played almost no role in Jewish society. According to 1921 census data, only 4 percent of the Jewish population worked in agriculture, 34 percent worked in industry, 41 percent worked in petty commerce, and 5 percent worked in the liberal professions. By 1931, the trend had changed, with Jews working in industry outnumbering Jews making their living from commerce.58

The typical skilled tradesman was a tailor or shoemaker, either self-employed or an apprentice; the typical merchant was a shopkeeper striving for financial independence. According to Latzky-Bertholdi, the high proportion of Jewish merchants and skilled tradesmen marginalized the Jews in Polish society and pushed them “to the light, less hygienic, and socioeconomically less important branches of the economy.”59 Jews played a significant role in the professions too: they accounted for about a third of the lawyers and notaries in Poland, a quarter of those employed in journalism and publishing, and more than half of the private physicians.60

The Jews in Poland were no poorer than Polish laborers and farmers. Those in the cities and shtetls had a higher standard of living than Polish farmers.61 Nevertheless, in all state-controlled segments of the economy, anyone who was not “a member of the Polish people” was discriminated against. Because the Jews were concentrated in the cities, they suffered economically more than any other ethnic group in Poland: they were barred from municipal and national administrative jobs; government institutions and government-owned companies were off limits to them; they could not obtain credit from Polish banks; Jewish merchants and skilled tradesmen had difficulty obtaining work permits; universities set restrictive quotas for Jewish students and put obstacles in their way; and the Sunday Rest Law advanced by the Polish government compelled the Jews to take two days a week off work.

To resolve the economic crisis, Polish finance minister Władysław Grabski adopted a radical economic policy. As one means of halting rampant inflation, the merchant class (which included many Jews) was taxed exorbitantly. The Polish government also reduced the number of Jews working in industry and commerce relative to non-Jewish Poles. The fight against inflation was damaging to Jewish merchants and skilled tradesmen, driving many into extreme poverty.

The tobacco industry, which was mostly in Jewish hands, also suffered severely. “As is known, Poland has imposed a monopoly over the tobacco industry, which previously employed a fairly large number of Jewish workers. Now 13,000 workers are employed in this monopolistic industry, and only 441 of them are Jews.” In Grodno, Jewish workers in the local tobacco factory (which had been expropriated from their Jewish owners) were required to work on the Sabbath; consequently, their numbers dropped dramatically. “If we leave the factory in Grodno out of the calculation, before the government monopoly 95 percent of the workers were Jewish and now only 45 percent are—and we have seen that out of 12,000 workers in the tobacco industry there are a total of 102 Jews.”62

Jews suffered discrimination in other sectors of the Polish economy as well. Of the fifty-two thousand workers employed in city-run factories in Warsaw, there were only five thousand to six thousand Jews, less than 3 percent of the total. In the late 1920s, Latzky-Bertholdi reported, the Warsaw light rail had recruited fifteen hundred workers, of whom just four were Jews. One new factory in Warsaw employed thirteen hundred workers, of whom only twenty were Jews.63 The percentage of Jews employed in oil refineries in eastern Galicia was high. In Borysław, for instance, half the workers were Jewish, as were 70 percent in Drohobycz. Beginning in 1925, the number of non-Jewish workers in the petroleum industry, including refineries, dropped by 20 percent, but among the Jews, the figure fell by 70 percent.64 The civil service was also closed to Jews, and the Poles made a strenuous effort to reduce the number of Jews in the professions, especially medicine and law. In 1927, Poland enacted a law requiring skilled tradesmen to take a proficiency exam in the Polish language to qualify for a business license; Jews who could not meet the minimum licensing requirements thus lost their sources of livelihood.65 Many Jews began to realize that the solution to their plight lay in migrating across the Atlantic.

Source: Dijour, Di Moderne Felker-Vanderung, 68.

Before World War I, 55 percent of emigrants from Poland were non-Jewish Poles, 30 percent were Jews, and 15 percent were members of other nationalities. After the war the pattern changed. In the 1920s Jews accounted for 69 percent of emigrants from Poland, Poles 23 percent, and other nationalities 8 percent.66 Although Jewish emigration from Poland was an integral part of overall emigration, the number of Jewish emigrants was disproportionately high.67

As the economic status of Polish Jews worsened, they became increasingly dependent on relatives who had migrated to Palestine or America. The exchange of letters from 1922 to 1939 between Wolf Lewkowicz and his family in Łódź and his nephew Sol Zissman in the United States indicates how severely the Polish government’s economic policy had impacted and impoverished Polish Jewry in the 1920s and 1930s.68 In early 1924, Wolf described to his nephew the harsh economic situation in Łódź: “The inflation here is unbelievably high, and I, as an ordinary citizen, am not in a position to provide for my hungry wife and children. In short, cold, need and hunger reign in my home.”

He shared with his nephew his wishes and aspirations, which were unattainable in Poland in the 1920s:

Devoted and most beloved Shloymele, it is hard, very hard, for me to write this to you, since I would rather cover it all up. The gift is small, but the shame is very great. I want very much to have the honor of having a home of my own and not live with my in-laws. I would yet want to earn with my own fingers [the money with which to buy] bread and salt, and not have to depend on someone else to be my breadwinner. I want very much for joy to reign in my home and for my children not to grow up [wild] as the oaks.69

The money that arrived from the United States helped the Lewkowiczes hold their heads up high and consider immigrating to Palestine or America. “Don’t delay your help, since the need is very great.” Wolf asked his nephew’s advice about whether to stay in Poland and try to survive there or “whether I should go to Palestine, Argentina or America. I impatiently await your help as well as your advice. I also want to let you know that neither my wife nor my mother agrees with my [wanting to make the] journey. They are not, however, in a position to hold me back from existing, from living, etc.”70

In July 1924, Wolf wrote to his nephew: “Things are very bad here in Poland these days, because of the problem of stabilization of money. There are many bankruptcies and suicides.”71 About half a year later, he wrote about emigration from Poland to Palestine: “The situation is not good here in Poland. This is a wretched and depressing time. There is an emigration from Poland to Palestine, but not everyone is in a position to leave. Only the privileged, the capitalists, et al., are going. What else shall I write, my devoted one?”72 We see from his letters that his reasons for considering emigration to Palestine were pragmatic and in no way ideological or Zionist. Financial support from the nephew in the United States was a lifeline for the Lewkowiczes. Their dependence on the dollars they received made it perfectly clear to them that they had no future in Poland, that their financial situation was not about to improve, and that emigration was the only possible solution.

And with respect to your writing that you want to send me a weekly subsidy and that I should write you how much I need per week, so dear child, I have written to you several times and write again that I request nothing of you. While I know very well that you think constantly of your uncle, nevertheless, you must always have yourself in mind. I mean your wife who is closest to you, and so on. Furthermore, I’m not a person who would burden another. May G-d help me so that I can repay you what I already owe you. As of now, I don’t foresee that in Poland there can be an opportunity for me to live and, nevertheless, I live . . . not because I want to live, but because I have to live. You know, surely, how a Jew lives: a little with miracles, a little with hope . . . and, in this way, one’s few years pass with nothing. The children grow up, not as I once imagined. We spend our lives, not as I once imagined. And we write letters to a nephew in America, not as I once imagined.73

In his book Di Ekonomishe Lage fun Yidn in Poyln (The economic situation of Polish Jewry), Lestschinsky gives a powerful description of the hardship, desperation, and loss of hope of Polish Jewry. “The tumult of the Jewish masses on Nalewki Street in Warsaw these days gives the impression of drowning people who are treading water but can’t move forward . . . a swamp with standing water that someone who falls into can’t crawl out of again.”74 Despair—what Lestschinsky terms “collective depression and panic”—became the norm for the Jews of Poland, as they could not extricate themselves from their economic predicament. His impressions of the Warsaw street markets and the local Jews are depressing and poignant: “When you come to such a market on a Sunday, you are first struck by long lines of low stalls lying silent and dead as if they were hiding something underneath them. . . . You see old Jewish women wrapped in rags; young women with pale, gaunt faces . . . a hunchbacked old man sitting in a corner repairing shoes; a figure, half-woman, half-witch, asking you to taste her warm, fresh beans.”75

When he visited the office of a small merchants’ association in Lemberg, Lestschinsky made the acquaintance of a few of the “living dead”: “Saturday night. The office is packed with Jewish men dressed in worn, faded Sabbath robes. Their faces are like their robes. A group of women stand separately off in a corner. They are short, dirty, and wrapped in strange scarves that hide their faces.” Lestschinsky went into a side room with the chair of the merchants’ association, and one after another impoverished Jews came in and presented their requests for assistance and economic support:

A small, thin woman stands in front of us, a big scarf covering her eyes. When she launches into a long, enthusiastic speech, the scarf rises and falls and we notice that the gaunt, dried-out Jewish woman who we had thought was over fifty is actually a young woman of thirty to thirty-five, with young, vibrant eyes. The way she speaks is a pleasure to hear. . . . She begins: Jews, compassionate children of compassionate parents! Will you allow a poor widow to fall into the abyss? Jews, a poor person like me is considered like one who is dead, but I am not yet dead, and my four children don’t want to die either. They peck but there is no bread, so they eat me alive and soon I will die. Jews, put yourselves in my place. My children have no father and no one to support them. Have mercy, as a father has on his children. Be their father!76

The widow explains that she must pay annual municipal taxes of sixty zloty for the right to have a stall in the market. Because she did not pay the tax from the beginning of the year, the city has decided to confiscate her stall unless a member of the Jewish council guarantees that she will repay the debt. Although she paid taxes for several months, the last month was particularly difficult for her, and because she did not have enough money, her debt built up. Furthermore, even before her husband died four years earlier, the burden of earning a living had fallen on her shoulders because he spent most of his time studying Torah and only from time to time earned a little from teaching.

Another person who came to meet with the chair of the merchants’ association in Lemberg was a tall, thin young man wearing clean, polished shoes. He had owned a shoe store in the center of Warsaw, but during the economic crisis of 1925, he was forced to close it and rent another store. He had to close that one, too, and then he started selling shoes in a market stall. Lestschinsky described the man’s foppish appearance as a sort of last remnant of better years when he had earned a living with dignity. The decline of the economy and the closure of his business had caused the overdressed man to lose hope of improving his financial status. For years he had hidden his troubles and hardships, but finally he realized that he would have to ask for assistance from the Jewish charitable organizations—the latest to join the ranks of beggars.

The three cases described above—the Lewkowicz family, the young widow, and the overdressed shoe seller—exemplify the economic hardship into which Polish Jewry sank in the second half of the 1920s. As the situation worsened, more and more people sought to migrate to Palestine and elsewhere. From 1924 to 1926, more than sixty-two thousand immigrants arrived in Palestine—more than twice as many as between 1919 and 1923.

Joshua Gordon, a high-ranking official in the Aliya Department and the first director of the Tel Aviv aliya bureau, wrote a comprehensive study in the mid-1920s entitled Immigration Problems in Palestine. In it he claimed, “In spite of the fact that Poland exists now as a united state de jure, it cannot be regarded as such defacto as far as the immigration material and the conditions of Jewry are concerned.”77 According to Gordon, the causes of emigration from Congress Poland (Russia), Lithuanian Poland, and Galicia (Austria) were all different. For instance, in Congress Poland “the Halutz movement in Congress Poland is quite backward.” The halutzic component “is so small that it is nearly not worthwhile mentioning. Most of the members belong to the other Polish provinces and come mainly from Polish Lithuania and the adjacent district.” In contrast, in Polish Lithuania “the position is quite different in this district. There also is noticeable a more or less considerable movement among the middle class and to a certain extent among the artisans.” According to Gordon, however, “they are small village merchants who have a piece of land which both they and their children cultivate as a garden. The number of these people increased especially during the war. Now, they feel compelled to leave these places owing to political and economic and also to the attitude of their neighbours . . . their only desire is to go to Palestine.”78 In Galicia, Gordon wrote, “social life is to a certain degree different to that of congress Poland.” In the past, “Galicia furnished the bulk of the highest quality of Halutz material but at present the membership has dwindled down to a negligeable quantity.’” His conclusion was that “without doubt there is much good material for Palestine among all classes in Eastern Galicia; but as a result of the general depression and inefficient organization sufficient use is not made of the good field of work and the available hidden forces are not given a chance to develop and become active.”79

Gordon also explained the reasons for emigration from Poland. The simple fact, he recognized, was that most of the Jews trying to migrate to Palestine were doing so because of the severe push factors in their countries of origin and not primarily because of the pull factors of the destination country. “And, daily they stream in their hundreds to the Palestine Offices to inquire about the possibilities in Palestine. What they want to know is, whether there are any possibilities of existence and doing business in Palestine. We must be clear in our minds about this point: it is not the ideal which they discovered suddenly that makes them turn to Palestine; it is not the light of Zionist idealism which they have suddenly seen; it is the Palestinian reality which they want to try.”80

Having said “there is no intention whatever in this statement to reflect in any respect upon Polish Jewry and its ideal qualifications,” Gordon clarified, “There is no degradation in it at all.” In other words, “it only means that Polish Jews simply learned the Zionist lesson under the pressure of circumstances in a forced and quicker tempo and from a different aspect, consequently the results must also differ somewhat.” At first, Polish Jews were skeptical about the idea of rejecting the exile and about the Zionist argument that the Jewish people had no future—neither spiritual nor economic—in the Diaspora. “But now from actual life they suddenly realized the practical truth of this fact. Now, when our propagandists came again to tell them, that now the only place where the Jewish people will find a haven of rest and a possibility to exist in Palestine; this, which formerly appeared to them as a remote dream of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, now suddenly began to be seriously considered by them not only as a national solution of the Jewish problem, but as a business proposition to every Jew in Particular.”81

Zionist Ideology

Alongside the government persecution, the danger of pogroms, and the economic hardship, there were those who had ideological motivations for wanting to immigrate to Palestine. Some of these Zionist Jews were young, unmarried socialists who wanted to establish a model socialist society in Palestine; others were people with families who belonged to the European bourgeoisie.

The Balfour Declaration and British conquest of Palestine breathed new hope into the Zionist movement and put the wind back into its sails. The British government kept its commitment to establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. Herbert Samuel was named the first high commissioner, and Palestine was opened up to immigration. In 1921, Chaim Weizmann was elected president of the Zionist Organization and started rebuilding its institutions after a five-year moratorium due to the war. It seemed to be straight sailing for the Zionist movement, in terms of both practical settlement and political and diplomatic affairs.

While Weizmann was rebuilding the Zionist institutions, new halutzic youth movements were formed and others resumed their activity, embarking on a series of steps in preparation for immigration to Palestine. Hechalutz, the Dror Federation, Hashomer Hatzair, Tze’irei Zion, the Socialist Zionists (who had broken off from Tze’irei Zion), Blauweiss, Tekhelet Lavan, and Betar all sought to win young Jews over to the Zionist idea and encouraged them to move to Palestine. Disputes over matters of principle, sometimes fundamental and sometimes picayune, prevented the youth movements from cooperating with one another; each followed its own ideology to further its goals. Despite the disagreements and the ideological gaps, however, the youth movements had one thing in common: they all trained their members to settle and work in Palestine, taught them Hebrew, and helped them obtain the necessary travel papers for aliya. A call circulated by the Tze’irei Zion Center in Russia shortly after the Balfour Declaration expresses the innermost feelings of the Zionist youth: “Members of Tze’irei Zion! Stand ready in the ranks of the pioneers. Now, after the worldwide emergency, what was distant will once again be near. The great call for the redemption of our people and our land will reach the ears of the entire nation, wherever they may be. When systematic work begins on the new aliya, which is unprecedented in the history of our people, we will all be ready.”82

Unlike in the Second Aliya, when young people migrated on their own or in couples, the migration of youth movement members in the 1920s was organized and structured. The movements brought over large groups of immigrants after a training period on a farm in Europe. The Russian Hechalutz movement, whose prominent founders included Joseph Trumpeldor, occupied an important place in this effort. After the fighting in Gallipoli, Trumpeldor returned to Russia and worked tirelessly and resolutely to establish branches of his movement and training farms for young candidates for aliya. At the meeting of the Hechalutz board in Cracow in January 1918, Trumpeldor defined the movement’s aims and objectives: “Hechalutz is in the vanguard of workers immigrating to Palestine to actualize the settlement issue. Its aim is to prepare the land for the people by uniting and bringing together all the forces ready to dedicate themselves to achieving this goal in Palestine.”83

Branches of Hechalutz existed in places such as Poland, Lithuania, Romania, Latvia, Galicia, and central Europe. In 1921, the movement became the executive branch of the Zionist movement with respect to training halutzim and distributing immigration certificates. Eliyahu Dobkin, the Warsaw-based secretary-general of the World Hechalutz movement, maintained that at the height of halutzic aliya, roughly 11,500 halutzim arrived in Palestine.84

Another important halutzic youth movement in the 1920s was Hashomer Hatzair. This movement was founded in 1913 but only took shape during World War I. It had two centers: one in Galicia, which until the end of the war was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the other in Congress Poland, which was part of the Russian Empire. In Galicia, most Hashomer Hatzair members came from the better-off classes in Jewish society: merchants, professionals, and affluent skilled tradesmen. Many of the young people were assimilated, and the movement’s activities (especially in the big cities) were conducted in Polish. World War I was the formative experience of their adolescence. They lived as refugees in Vienna, they witnessed the impoverishment of their parents and the breakup of their families when their fathers were drafted to fight the war, and they were forced to take odd jobs.85 Hashomer Hatzair in Congress Poland, in contrast, had a more “Jewish” character and was aware of the part it played in Jewish society.86 When the new Polish republic was established, Hashomer Hatzair members from Galicia and Congress Poland found themselves in the same country. In practice, however, the two branches of the movement never merged and continued to coexist as fraternal twins.

The first wave of olim from Hashomer Hatzair came from Galicia; most arrived in 1920, with a smaller number immigrating in 1921. Although an estimated six hundred people arrived in this wave, most of them did not make it and left the country.87 The newcomers, who dispersed throughout Palestine, had to adapt themselves to local working conditions. Groups of Hashomer Hatzair members settled in Beit Gan (near Yavne’el), Dilb (Kiryat Anavim), Umm al-Alaq (Shuni, not far from Binyamina), Migdal (on the Haifa-Jedda road), and Bitanya Illit. Few olim arrived from Congress Poland in those years; only after the aliya bureau regularized the aliya process did their share increase. The big wave of Hashomer Hatzair olim came from Poland in the second half of the 1920s, in the years that Zionist historiography has identified as the bourgeois Fourth Aliya.

In 1923, Hechalutz had 5,470 members in 224 branches located in nine European countries. Hashomer Hatzair had 1,400 members aged twelve to nineteen. The other pioneering movements, such as Blauweiss in Germany and Tekhelet Lavan in Czechoslovakia, were much smaller and probably had no more than a thousand members altogether. Thus, the aliya “reserves” of the halutzic movements in Europe in the 1920s, including the young members, did not exceed 7,000.88

The Zionist ideology promoted by the various youth movements was a major component in their members’ decision to immigrate to Palestine. They were motivated first and foremost by their national worldview, which regarded the Land of Israel as the place for the revitalization of the Jewish people. The pogroms during the civil war, systemic government discrimination against the Jews, and economic hardship were not their reasons for aliya; they were merely bleak manifestations of the plight of the Jewish people in exile. For them, the appropriate solution was immigration to their one and only national home in Palestine. The pull factors of Palestine were stronger than the push factors of their countries of origin; their arrival in Palestine was the practical fulfillment of the Zionist idea. Although halutzim accounted for a small proportion of immigrants to Palestine in the 1920s, their contribution to the Zionist enterprise was tremendous.

In the following chapters, we will see the main dilemma that the Zionist movement faced with respect to the distribution of immigration certificates: Should they be given to members of the halutzic youth movements, who were young and healthy in body and soul and wanted to immigrate to Palestine for clear Zionist reasons, to build up the country and be transformed by it? Or should they be given to Jewish refugees and immigrants who had lost their families and their worldly possessions and who regarded Palestine as no more (but no less) than a land of refuge?

The geopolitical situation in Europe after World War I directly influenced immigration to Palestine in the 1920s. The Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires had broken up; new nation-states had arisen in their place; and Jews found themselves in a new, unfamiliar, and harmful political and social order. The civil war in Ukraine left one hundred thousand Jews killed or wounded and triggered the migration of tens of thousands of Jewish refugees, who reached almost everywhere in Europe. Life in Russia after the October Revolution of 1917 was unbearable. The Bolshevik regime imposed a rigid, dogmatic way of life by violent, brutal means, causing severe shortages and famine and impoverishing the Russian people. In Poland, meanwhile, inflation was rampant, and the government adopted an economic policy that harmed the middle class, to which most Polish Jews belonged. The Jews of eastern Europe sought to flee to any country that would have them. The United States—their preferred destination—set new, restrictive quotas on immigration and thus no longer offered a solution to the plight of the eastern European Jews. After other destination countries followed suit, tightening their own immigration policies, Palestine gradually became the main destination for Jewish immigrants. While the socioeconomic situation of eastern European Jewry suffered, the Zionist movement found itself in a much better position after World War I than before the war. The British takeover of Palestine and the Balfour Declaration inspired new hope that Zionism could be realized through immigration to Palestine and settlement there.

In his study on the problems of immigration to Palestine, Joshua Gordon distinguishes between olim and immigrants and discusses the nature of Jewish migration in the 1920s: “Together with the Hechalutz movement which is developing in a normal and systematic manner in every country alongside with the general internal Zionist work there awoke at the same time a movement among the masses to emigrate to Palestine. This movement can be noticed in every country where Jews are to be found in more or less considerable numbers. Originally called to life by the Zionist ideal, it does not at present stand any more under the influence of ideals in general or under the influence of the Zionist Organisation in particular.” According to Gordon, the push factors in the countries of origin and the Jews’ desire to emigrate had turned the migration into a social phenomenon that had spiraled out of control.

From the symptoms which are already noticeable this is not a movement of many individuals which are converted into a mass by the addition of the right numbers but it is a mass movement by nature in which the will or the common sense of the individual is of no account. The individual is simply carried along by the general stream not being able to resist the force of mass psychology. But at the same tone the moving forces which are behind this movement do not remain in one place but are becoming more and more powerful from day to day; and the development of these forces is, just as much as these forces themselves are, outside the sphere of our influence.89

Jewish immigration to Palestine in the 1920s, Gordon argued, was uncontrollable, and the Zionist movement was helpless to influence it, change its direction, or determine its characteristics. “This mass movement to Palestine has now reached especially the middle classes of the Jewish people in nearly all the places of the Diaspora. This immigration movement I called ‘Natural Immigration’ to distinguish it from the Zionist pioneer movement, because the original causes to which it is due are the same as those of all immigration movements.” Gordon saw no difference between Jewish immigration to Palestine and to other countries. “The present natural immigration movement to Palestine presents one phase of the many wandering of the Jewish people during the time of its exile. We would very quickly have recognised it as such if its aim had been Galveston, Buenos Aires or the United States, but it appears rather strange to us when, owing to the force of a complex of circumstances . . . it has chosen as its destination the Tel Aviv of Palestine instead of the East Side of New York.”90