United distributing committee of American funds of aid to the Jews victims of the war, it was founded in 1914. That was a charitable organization that collected and distributed goods and money to help Jewish communes and communal structures. After the October Revolution, the Joint expanded its activity in Soviet Russia during the civil war and later in USSR. The Joint organized collecting and delivering of humanitarian aid to the starving ones (not only Jews), established Jewish orphanages, provided ruined Jewish handicraftsmen and Jewish artels with tools and equipment. In the mid-Twenties, the Agro-Joint department was established. That organization thoroughly aided new agricultural Jewish settlements - with machines, with seeds, with experts and with medicines.

In 1939, the activity of the Joint in USSR had to be stopped. Fifty years later, the Joint helped the Jews of USSR-CIS; it used new possibilities to restore Jewish life in the conditions of democratic reforms.