Crowd of the Jewish refugees in the open air in Russia. One of the three uniformed officials with them is examining their papers.
The Jewish family of Gefens in their homestead land in Birobidzhan in the Jewish Autonomous Region of the USSR. Jewish settlers began to come to this region in 1928.
The Royal Janitor
by
John Presco
Copyright 2023
Chapter: The Rose of Crimean California
Victoria and Miriam watched Putin’s speech on Professor John’s big T.V. screen.
“What the hell does that lunatic want?” asked John. “He took the Crimea and got away with it. Was he afraid the Ukrainians would take it back?”
“I haven’t a clue!” Victoria said, it not every day she is stumped. It was the anniversary of the Ukraine War, and the whole world was puzzled, especially China who was forced to take a side.
“I think I may know.” Offered Miriam Starfish. “My father grew up in the Crimea. The Jews that lived there believed they have been living in the peninsula since ancient times. They were divided into two communities: the Krymchaks, who followed rabbinical Judaism, and the Karaites, who rejected the Oral Torah. Soon after Catherine the Great conquered the region from the Ottoman Empire in 1783, she opened it up to Jewish settlement, hoping that the Jews would serve as a bulwark against the Turks. Although Jews were later barred from living in the major cities, the peninsula promised open spaces and freedom to adventurous Jews seeking new frontiers and willing to take up a spade.Later, Stalin approved of a Jewish State, the Crimean California. My parents were trying to form a Karaite community near Mount Shasta. But everyone hated them because oof their theory.
“And, what pray tell theory was that?” John, spat, he wanting to get into a sound intellectual debate with his tormentor, who now sounded grounded.
“They believed Jesus raised the Karahites from their graves after he died on the cross – for their sins – that angered Yahwew. When he rose from the dead, he took them on a ship to the Crimea, that he declared was the New Judea.”
John Von John’s jaw dropped. He had long puzzled over this passage in Matthew.
50 And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit.
51 At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split 52 and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. 53 They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and[a] went into the holy city and appeared to many people.
John felt a chill come over him as he stared deep into Miriam’s eye while reciting this passage in Numbers. It was a marriage. Long lost knowledge, had been wed. How were they seperated?
31 As soon as he finished saying all this, the ground under them split apart 32 and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them and their households, and all those associated with Korah, together with their possessions. 33 They went down alive into the realm of the dead, with everything they owned; the earth closed over them, and they perished and were gone from the community.
“OF COURSE! This is why the curtain was torn in two – AND RUINED! The God wanted to hang the curtain of the Karahites over the entrance of the Holy of Holies. THEY HAVE BEEN RESTORED!”
To be continued!
Today is February 24, 2023. I awoke around 2:30 A.M. and could not go back to sleep. I got on my computer, and found “Crimea California. Reading about the Levites. I read Numbers 16:31-33. A mouse appear in mousehole I have been staring at for thirty-five years.
John Presco
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/crimea-as-jewish-homeland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karaite_Judaism
Crimean California
The first option emerged in 1926 when Moscow announced support for a Jewish autonomous region in the Crimea, whereby about 96,000 Jewish families would move there.
The project gained an international dimension when in 1929 the USSR signed an agreement with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a Jewish relief organization based in New York. It gave $1.5 million a year to finance “Crimean California” and Jewish resettlement to the region.
The USSR started to equip communes in Crimea for Jews to live in. It started well: several communes were created and worked effectively planting seeds and developing cattle breeding. However, problems soon emerged: local groups, who were envious of the well-financed Crimean Jews, started pogroms and created serious unrest in the peninsula.
“Crimean California”: as the United States wanted to create “New Israel” in the Crimea
2021-03-02
5802
Today, the transfer of Crimea from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954, many are assessed as one of the main mistakes of Khrushchev. But in the light of the information about the project “Crimean California” it seems that this decision was forced and delivered the USSR from the full loss of the peninsula. It started still back in 1924.
Jewish Republic in Crimea
It was then that a charity organization from the USA “Joint” made a proposal to create a Jewish autonomy in the USSR, which, according to the original project, called “Crimean California”, in addition to the peninsula itself, was supposed to include the territory of Odessa and Kherson, as well as the Black Sea coast, right up to Abkhazia. The main financing of the project was entitled to the “Joint”, and the USSR received a number of large loans for 30 years.
A number of contracts were concluded between the Joint and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR, in accordance with which bonds were issued in the Union, which were provided by the nodes of the Crimean Earth (shares). The main part of the bonds was purchased by large American millionaires and officials. Among them was the future American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Project implementation
In accordance with the project, it was planned to move into Crimea at least half a million landless Jews living in the territory of Ukraine and Belarus. But the experience was unsuccessful. The local Crimean population was opposed to immigrants. Yes, and the Jews themselves who have acquired land, were in no hurry to engage in unusual peasant labor. By decision I. V. Stalin, in 1934 the project was minimized, and the Jewish Republic was created in the Far East – in the form of the Jewish Autonomous Region with the capital in Birobijan.
Crimea and Land Liz
“The Crimean Question” reappeared again during the war years. At the Tehran Conference, Roosevelt turned to Stalin with the condition: Further deliveries on Land Lases and the opening of the second front may only be possible in the event of resuscitation of the Crimean California project. The Americans prepared the so-called “note of the Crimea”, addressed to Stalin and Molotov. In her text, which leads to Mikhail Poltoranin in one of its articles, it contains persistent “request” not just to complete the project, but also overpay the Black Sea Fleet in Odessa.
Stalin was an opponent to create a Jewish SSR, and therefore some actions to fulfill the contract were taken to them more for the species. Moreover, the foreign policy situation changed and the United States from an ally turned into a potential opponent. Many historians believe that the support of Stalin Zionist movement in the Middle East in the late 1940s is largely connected with the desire to create a Jewish state outside the USSR.
As part of Ukraine
In 1954, Khrushchev handed the Crimea from the RSFSR to Ukraine, which actually made it impossible to fulfill the initial contracts with the Joint. After all, the peninsula no longer belonged. At the same time, the Jews in the USSR already had its own territory, there was also a full-fledged state in the Middle East. Formally, the further implementation of the project “Crimean California” simply did not make sense.
Dmitry Karaichev in his article “Myth about the sale of Crimea” disputes this version, arguing that under contracts with “Jonth” there were no mortgage obligations at the USSR. Check it is currently not possible, since the originals of contracts still remain classified.
“On the way to Sevastopol, not too far from Simferopol,” begins what is probably the most famous Yiddish song from the Soviet Union, “Hey Dzhankoye.” The song, named after a collective farm near the Crimean town of Dzhankoy, celebrates the alleged victories of the Soviet collectivization drive of the 1920s and 1930s, which, according to the song, magically transformed Jewish merchants into farmers. “Who says that Jews can only trade?” asks the final verse of the song, “Just take a look at Dzhan.”
Now, as the new government in Kiev struggles to find its footing after the ouster of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, Russian troops are occupying the Crimea in the name of protecting ethnic Russians and, as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov suggested at the United Nations, combating anti-Semitic ultra-nationalists—an ironic twist, less than a century after the Kremlin contemplated the peninsula as the site of a potential Jewish homeland.
Jews have been living in the peninsula since ancient times, largely divided into two communities: the Krymchaks, who followed rabbinical Judaism, and the Karaites, who rejected the Oral Torah. Soon after Catherine the Great conquered the region from the Ottoman Empire in 1783, she opened it up to Jewish settlement, hoping that the Jews would serve as a bulwark against the Turks. Although Jews were later barred from living in the major cities, the peninsula promised open spaces and freedom to adventurous Jews seeking new frontiers and willing to take up a spade.
Tens of thousands of mostly young Jews settled in this part of “New Russia” over the next century. The Crimea became so identified with Russia’s Jewish history, in fact, that Jewish activists in St. Petersburg pointed to the long legacy of Crimean Jews as an argument for Jewish emancipation in the empire—after all, they claimed, Jews had been living there longer than Russians. (The 19th-century Karaite historian Avraam Firkovich even tried to argue that Karaites were living in the Crimea before the time of Jesus Christ, and he fabricated tombstone inscriptions to prove it.)
Jewish residents of the Crimea were also deeply engaged in the critical Jewish question of the time—Zionism—and by the late 19th century the area had become a training ground for future Zionist pioneers, who practiced agricultural techniques there before relocating to Palestine. Joseph Trumpeldor—who famously gave his life defending the northern Galilee settlement of Tel Hai with the motto “It is good to die for our country”—once trained potential migrants in the Crimea. (One Crimean settlement was named Tel Hai in his honor.)
In the early 1920s, the new Soviet government once again turned its attention to the peninsula. Concerned that the Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians, and Germans who mostly populated the region were anti-Communist, officials in Moscow were eager to buy the loyalty of new recruits with land grants and promises of autonomy in the agriculturally rich peninsula. When the American agronomist and communal activist Joseph A. Rosen suggested providing financial support through the Joint Distribution Committee to resettle Jewish victims of the pogroms in the region, the Kremlin jumped at the opportunity. In 1923, the Politburo accepted a proposal for establishing a Jewish Autonomous Region in the Crimea, before reversing itself a few months later.
Nevertheless, from 1924 until 1938, the Joint Distribution Committee, through its subsidiary American Jewish Joint Agricultural Corporation and with the financial support of American Jewish philanthropists like Julius Rosenwald, supported Jewish agricultural settlements in Soviet Crimea. Numerous Jewish collective farms and even whole Jewish districts sprouted over the next few years. The dream of building a Jewish republic in the Crimea remained alive until the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Most of the Jewish colonists in the Crimea fled east to seek safety far from the front; entire collective farms fled together, traveling in convoys eastward, just ahead of the German troops, all the way to Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan.
Great Purge[edit]
Main article: Great Purge
Stalin’s harshest period of mass repression, the Great Purge (or Great Terror), was launched in 1936–1937 and involved the execution of over a half-million Soviet citizens accused of treason, terrorism, and other anti-Soviet crimes. The campaign of purges prominently targeted Stalin’s former opponents and other Old Bolsheviks, and included a large-scale purge of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, repression of the kulak peasants, Red Army leaders, and ordinary citizens accused of conspiring against Stalin’s administration.[9] Although many of Great Purge victims were ethnic or religious Jews, they were not specifically targeted as an ethnic group during this campaign according to Mikhail Baitalsky,[10] Gennady Kostyrchenko,[11] David Priestland,[12] Jeffrey Veidlinger,[13] Roy Medvedev[14] and Edvard Radzinsky.[15]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Israel
https://www.rbth.com/history/326412-stalin-jewish-autonomous-region-russia
https://www.rbth.com/history/326412-stalin-jewish-autonomous-region-russia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_A._Rosen
According to the recollections of the daughter of Ezekiel A. Groer, Rosen even managed to meet with Vyacheslav Molotov, but Molotov said that he could not do anything, since Rosen’s former Agro-Joint employees had already confessed to everything.[10] In fact, both Groer and Lyubarsky had already been shot[10] (the former on March 15, 1938,[8] the latter on September 1, 1938[9]). In total, during the years of the Stalinist terror, at least 30 employees of Agro-Joint[12] were repressed, and in total 70 people were involved in the Agro-Joint case and all were convicted.[13] Rosen’s name has figured in many cases not directly related to Joint. For example, a Moscow rabbi Shmarya Yehuda Leib Medalia was accused of receiving money from Rosen to distribute to the poor. Other members of this Moscow religious community (Meyer L. Rabinovich, Emanuil Ya. Sheptovitsky, et al.) were also accused of distributing this money.[3]
Joseph A. Rosen (born: Joseph Borisovich Rosen, 1877, Moscow — 1949, New York), an American agronomist of Russian origin, was head of the Russian branch of the Joint[1] and head of Agro-Joint from 1924 to 1938.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jewish_Joint_Distribution_Committee
The organisation was led by Moses A. Leavitt until his death in 1965; Leavitt was then succeeded by Charles H. Jordan.[9] Jordan died in Prague in 1967. His death was declared suicide by Czechoslovak government, in the context of communist denouncements of the JDC at the time, The New York Times reported his death as mysterious.[10] In 1974, Czechoslovak defector Josef Frolik advised the Central Intelligence Agency in 1974 that Jordan had been abducted by Arab agents and died during interrogation by Palestinians at the Egyptian embassy in Prague.[11]
The JDC went further to improve conditions for the Jews living in the Ukraine by bringing 86 tractors from America to the 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 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 American Declaration of War in Dec 1941: JDC Becomes a Clandestine Organization[edit]
With U.S. entry into the war following Pearl Harbor in Dec. 1941, JDC had to drastically shift gears. No longer permitted to operate legally in enemy countries, JDC representatives exploited a variety of international connections to channel aid to Jews living in desperate conditions in Nazis-controlled areas. Wartime headquarters were set up in neutral Lisbon, Portugal.
From Lisbon, JDC chartered ships and funded rescue missions that successfully moved thousands of refugees out of harm’s way. Some made it to Shanghai, China, where JDC sponsored a relief program for 15,000 refugees from Central and Eastern Europe. In Europe, JDC directed funds to support 7,000 Jewish children in hiding. The Joint also worked with Œuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE) to support and rescue children. For instance, it helped more than 1,000 children emigrate to Switzerland and Spain. Other children fled to America, with help from the Joint and other organizations, such as HIAS. Many of those children who were able to make it to America came without parents, making them part of the “One Thousand Children(OTC).
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the MS St. Louis[edit]
On May 13, 1939, the ocean liner MS St. Louis left Germany and headed to Havana Cuba. On the ship, there were 937 passengers, most of which were Jews fleeing a Nazi-occupied Germany. Nearly all the Jewish passengers had applied for U.S. visas, and planned to stay in Cuba only until they obtained U.S. visas. However, the Cuban government “revoked” the Cuban visas, and only granted entry to Cuba to 28 of the 937 passengers. Furthermore, the U.S. refused to provide entry visas to America.
Once this news reached Europe and the United States, an attorney, Lawrence Berenson, who worked with the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee decided to intervene on behalf of the passengers being denied entry to Cuba. During this time, the JDC was striving to help Jewish immigrants find a home, so the goal of Berenson was to help these passengers find a home. Berenson met and negotiated with Cuban President Federico Laredo Brú; however the negotiations were unsuccessful. On June 2, Bru demanded the St. Louis leave Cuban waters. The ship sailed close to Florida’s borders, and asked President Roosevelt to grant them access into the United States. They never received a response. The ship returned to Europe and the JDC continued to negotiate on behalf of the passengers. Morris C. Troper as well as other individuals of the JDC appealed to European governments to secure entry visas for those with nowhere to go.
Due to the efforts of the JDC, 288 passengers were admitted to Great Britain, 181 to the Netherlands, 214 to Belgium, and 224 to France. When Hitler and the Nazis overran the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France, those passengers who had been admitted by those countries were at risk. Tragically, in fact 254 of these St. Louis Passengers were killed in the Holocaust. Due to the JDC active efforts and connections, JDC was able to save most of the Jewish passengers aboard the St. Louis.[23]
Resettlement in Israel[edit]
The time came for JDC to shift its focus in Europe from emergency relief to long-term rehabilitation. A large part of its evolving mission involved preparing the Jewish refugee population for new lives in Palestine, soon to be the Jewish state of Israel. Vocational training and hachsharot (agricultural training) centers were established for this purpose.
The goal of resettlement carried its own hurdles. Since before the war, Palestine had been under control of Great Britain, which severely restricted the immigration of Europe’s Jewish refugees. Clandestine immigration went on in spite of the blockades, largely because of the work of Bricha and Aliyah Bet, two organized movements partially financed and supplied by JDC. When the British began interning illegal Jewish immigrants in detention camps on Cyprus, JDC furnished medical, educational, and social services for the detainees.
Britain’s eventual withdrawal from Palestine set the stage for the May 15, 1948, birth of the State of Israel, which quickly drew waves of Jews not only from Europe, but from across the Arab world. North Africa became an especially dangerous place for Jews following World War II. Jews in Libya suffered a devastating pogrom in 1945.
The 1948 Arab–Israeli War in Palestine set off a wave of nationalist fervor in the region, leading to anti-Jewish riots in Aden, Morocco, and Tripoli. Nearly the entire Jewish population of Libya, 31,000 persons, immigrated to Israel within a few years. The JDC and Israel organized Operation Magic Carpet, the June 1948 airlift of 50,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel. In all, more than 300,000 Jews left North Africa for Israel. Thousands more Iraqi and Kurdish Jews were transported through Operation Ezra, also funded by JDC.
The influx was so massive—and the capacity of the newborn nation to provide for its burgeoning citizenry so limited—that the dream of statehood could have died before it had taken root. Among the new arrivals were 100,000 veterans of Europe’s DP camps, less than half able-bodied adults. The remainder included the aged, sick, or disabled survivors of concentration camps. Tuberculosis was rampant.
As its record of accomplishment in Israel makes clear, JDC helped Israel develop social welfare methods and policy, with many of its programs having served as models for government and non-governmental agencies around the world. In the 1950s, institutional care for the aged was replaced whenever practicable with JDC initiatives that enabled older people to live at home in their communities. The Ministry of Health was established in collaboration with the Psychiatric Trust Fund to develop modern, integrated mental health services and to train qualified staff. The Paul Baerwald School of Social Work, first created by JDC in France to train professionals working with refugees from many diverse cultures, was reestablished at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to professionalize social services.
Diaspora work[edit]
The 1980s and 1990s saw JDC expand both its reach and the scope of its mission. Under the banner of “Rescue, Relief, and Renewal,” the organization responded to the challenges that faced Jewish communities around the world, its emphasis on building the capacity of local partners to be self-sustaining.
The thawing of the Cold War and subsequent break up of the Soviet Union yielded a formal invitation from Mikhail Gorbachev for JDC’s return to the region in 1989; 50 years after Joseph Stalin brutally expelled the organization, killing several JDC members in the process. The former Soviet Union and its largely isolated and destitute community of elderly Jewish populations quickly became—and remain—the organization’s priority. A growing network of Heseds, or Hesed Jewish Community Welfare Centers in the former Soviet Union, that JDC helped establish in local communities provided welfare assistance to a peak caseload of 250,000 elderly Jews. According to a JDC publication, “The first Hesed Center was established in 1993 in St. Petersburg by Dr. Amos Avgar of the AJJDC.”[26] Dr. Avgar began developing the Hesed Model in 1992 while leading a work of experts who sought to create “a multi-functional service model.”[27] It was Avgar who set the foundations of the Hesed Model that operates according to three main principles: Jewish values, community orientation, and voluntarism.[28] Hesed Centers have left a profound impact on both Jewish communities and on non-Jewish circles in the FSU. To publicly and formally acknowledge this impact, the Russian Academy of Languages added in March 2000 the Hebrew word “Hesed” (хесед) to the Russian language.[29] Today, the Hesed Community Welfare Centers is still serving 168,000 of the world’s poorest Jews in the former Soviet Union (December 2008).
JDC has also been instrumental in the rescue of Jews fleeing famine, violence, and other dangers around the world. The saga of Ethiopia‘s Jews was perhaps the most dramatic, culminating in Operation Solomon, the massive 36-hour airlift of 14,000 Jews from Addis Ababa to Israel on May 24 and 25, 1991, just as the city was about to come under rebel attack. JDC assisted in the negotiation and planning of that rescue effort, which came on the heels of the comprehensive health and welfare program it had been operating for the thousands of Jews who had gathered in Addis Ababa in preparation for the departure.
Africa and Asia. It terms of sheer numbers, Jewish communities in Africa and the Far East range from sizable (upwards of 25,000 in Turkey) to small (as of this writing, Algeria is home to only a handful of Jews, because of the Islamist governments of the 1990s). Jewish populations on both continents are diminishing, either through emigration or because the elderly are all that remain. But wherever there is a Jew and a desire to maintain the trappings and traditions of Jewish life, JDC strives to ensure that basic needs are met and Jewish institutions continue. JDC supports local Jewish education and training efforts and puts special emphasis on international programs that bridge isolated Jewish populations with Jews all over the world.
- The Americas. There are nearly a quarter million Jews in Argentina, more than in any other nation in the Western hemisphere after the United States. That number included a vibrant, emerging middle class. But much of that progress was thrown in turmoil by a nationwide financial crisis in 2001 that plunged thousands into economic despair and entrenched the pull of poverty for those already living in it. JDC responded, providing critical assistance to 36,000 Argentine Jews. Since then, JDC has begun to cede its assistance role to its local partners while continuing to ensure that basic food and medical needs of the most vulnerable citizens are met.
To offset the growing Jewish national and religious aspirations of Zionism and to successfully categorize Soviet Jews under Stalin’s nationality policy, an alternative to the Land of Israel was established with the help of Komzet and OZET in 1928. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast with the center in Birobidzhan in the Russian Far East was to become a “Soviet Zion”. Yiddish, rather than “reactionary” Hebrew, would be the national language, and proletarian socialist literature and arts would replace Judaism as the quintessence of culture. Despite a massive domestic and international state propaganda campaign, the Jewish population there never reached 30% (as of 2003 it was only about 1.2%). The experiment ground to a halt in the mid-1930s, during Stalin’s first campaign of purges, as local leaders were not spared during the purges.
Great Purge[edit]
Main article: Great Purge
Stalin’s harshest period of mass repression, the Great Purge (or Great Terror), was launched in 1936–1937 and involved the execution of over a half-million Soviet citizens accused of treason, terrorism, and other anti-Soviet crimes. The campaign of purges prominently targeted Stalin’s former opponents and other Old Bolsheviks, and included a large-scale purge of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, repression of the kulak peasants, Red Army leaders, and ordinary citizens accused of conspiring against Stalin’s administration.[9] Although many of Great Purge victims were ethnic or religious Jews, they were not specifically targeted as an ethnic group during this campaign according to Mikhail Baitalsky,[10] Gennady Kostyrchenko,[11] David Priestland,[12] Jeffrey Veidlinger,[13] Roy Medvedev[14] and Edvard Radzinsky.[15]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Israel
https://www.rbth.com/history/326412-stalin-jewish-autonomous-region-russia
https://www.rbth.com/history/326412-stalin-jewish-autonomous-region-russia
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/crimea-as-jewish-homeland
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/why-did-russia-give-away-crimea-sixty-years-ago
Rosamond Press 