Activities and Conflicts of ‘The Soviet Authority for the Advancement of Jewish Land Settlement’, 1924-1925
Keywords:
‘KOMZET’, East European Jewry, Jewish agricultural settlementAbstract
The KOMZET, the Authority for the Advancement of Settlement of ‘Jewish Land Workers’ had a rough start. Ratification of its bylaws was postponed for two years (1924 and 1925) and the practical matter of gaining permission for contact with land commissioners in the Ukrainian Republic and Crimean Autonomous Republic (both of which were hostile to the Jewish group) remained in limbo. The Jewish leadership strove to advance the KOMZET enterprise, concentrating its efforts in the southern Ukraine, where Jewish settlements had been established in the time of the czars, and northern Crimea that was sparsely populated. The two republics, however, put up obstacles designed to curtail the project and especially the Jewish national goal of establishing conditions for dense settlement (one hundred thousand families) that would serve as a territorial base for a Jewish socialist republic. The pressure from KOMZET’s opponents succeeded in minimizing the group’s authority, introducing proposals for dividing land settlement into geographical blocks distant from one another, and undermining the Jewish national goal. The article discusses KOMZET’s efforts in dealing with these challenges.
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