In August 1921 at the first ORT conference in Berlin it was resolved to found the World ORT Union, which united the local committees that were still working in the old marches of the Russian empire — Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Bessarabia. After the Revolution these regions fell outside the boundaries of the Soviet Union. The committees and departments that had recently been organised in Great Britain, Germany, France and in the USA were included in this new Union as well. Jacob Tsegelnitski was among the delegates of this conference, in the capacity of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Russian ORT although this organisation, for political reasons, was not able to be a member of the World ORT Union.

From that time and up to 1933, the Central Board of the World ORT Union, with L. Bramson as its president, D. Lvovich as vice-president and A. Syngalowski as its executive director, was situated in Berlin. All sub-committees and sections were managed from Berlin, and it was in Berlin that new charitable programmes were worked out for the assistance of the Jews of Eastern Europe, and discussions were held with government representatives from various countries. It should be noted that the principal languages employed for discussions at the Berlin ORT conference were Russian and Yiddish³. In 1933, with the arrival of the Nazi regime in Germany, ORT headquarters was transferred to Paris.

The ink had hardly dried on the Berlin conference protocols which provided for the founding of the World ORT Union, when there appeared at its headquarters on Bleibtreustrasse an official of Yidgezkom (an abbreviation from Yiddish: ‘Jewish Social Committee’) and member of Evsektsia⁴ named I. Rashkes. He had arrived in Berlin to establish contact with Jewish charitable organisations, and to discuss the possibility of working together with them to provide assistance to the Jewish population of Soviet Russia. This envoy from Moscow was at once invited to a session of the ORT executive at which D. Lvovich, A. Syngalowski, J. Tsegelnitski and I. Movshovich were present. In essence this was not a discussion, but rather a simple exchange of opinions with regard to the society’s work in Russia.

During this meeting Rashkes was given to understand that the World ORT Union looked on the provision of help to Russian Jews as one of its highest priorities, and was prepared at any moment to set up operations in a number of important cities of Soviet Russia. The only condition set by ORT leadership was that the Soviet administration should observe the democratic principles of ORT’s activity, upon which its work in other countries was based. One of these was the principle of ‘tripartite representation’ in ORT’s local committees: one third of the committee should be ‘elected by a general meeting of the society’s members’, one third should consist of ‘representatives of Jewish economic organisations such as agricultural, artisan and other co-operatives’, and one third should be appointed by the government — in the case of Russia, by Narkomnats (Narodny komissariat po delam natsionalnostei — the People’s Commissariat for National Affairs) — from among specialists and public figures. The ‘communisticised’ local committees of ORT would thus be reorganised. This democratisation of the Soviet ORT, which was regarded by the World ORT as its only possible partner for joint charitable work in the territory of the Soviet state and as a potential candidate for admission to the World ORT Union, would in the opinion of D. Lvovich lessen the Soviet administration’s control over the distribution of help from abroad and make such help more accessible, in the first instance, to declassed Jews.

Following lengthy discussion Rashkes agreed to the reorganisation of Soviet ORT and even gave it as his opinion that it would not be objected to by Narkomnats, which supervised the activity of Jewish organisations. Moreover, he tried to justify the ‘communisticisation’ of ORT as an attempt by Narkomnats to ‘preserve the apparatus and the name of the society’, and he especially emphasised that ‘the communisticised committees were regarded as temporary organs, beneath which a base more in tune with society was eventually to be built up.’ But Rashkes was cunning. He was a convinced Bolshevik member of Evsektsia and understood very well that the ‘de-Sovietisation’ of any public organisations in Russia was simply impossible, that the building of ‘a base more in tune with society’ could never happen. He was playing a double game, promising his potential benefactors anything and everything in order to get them to co-operate with the Soviet government. In this connection it is instructive to consider his conduct in 1922, when Lvovich on his trip to the USA succeeded in raising a considerable sum from the American Federation of Ukrainian Jews for the support of their countrymen in the USSR. Upon learning that this money was initially to be paid to ORT in Berlin, Rashkes issued a categorical demand that it should be transferred directly to the account of the All-Russian ORT.

After Rashkes’s visit, during 1921 and 1922, the ORT Union began intensive work on the organisation of its official representation in the cities of Soviet Russia. The following were appointed as plenipotentiary representatives of the ORT Union: L. Ioffe in Kiev, A. Vainshtein in Odessa, I. Ugorsky in Minsk, A. Ioffe in Moscow. The old ORT activist J. Tsegelnitski, since 1921 resident in Berlin but still retaining Soviet citizenship, was appointed chief plenipotentiary representative of the World ORT Union. Permanent entry visas were issued at the Soviet Consulate in Berlin for ORT officials who had to work in the USSR.

In great haste, without waiting for official agreements to be concluded with Soviet organisations, considerable sums were allotted by the World ORT Union for the purchase of seed and implements for the old Jewish agricultural colonies in Ukraine which, after the Civil War, were in desperate straits. Under the supervision of D. Lvovich, from autumn 1921 to the end of 1922 for the assistance of the hunger-stricken Jewish colonies, more than a hundred wagon-loads of seed and agricultural equipment were sent by the ORT Union through the organisation of F. Nansen.

In the papers of the Presidium of the General Committee of the Ukraine ORT for 1921 and 1922 is a whole series of letters and telegrams received from the Berlin headquarters of the ORT Union, which form a dramatic record of the events connected with the delivery of this freight to the Jewish agricultural colonies. A telegram from 9 January speaks of ‘the dispatching of three wagon-loads of seed from Revel’, and a letter from 23 January refers to a regular consignment of ‘vegetable seeds and implements’ which has been ‘dispatched by steamer via Constantinople to Revel’. However, at the end of February this steamer ‘returned to Stettin because of ice’ and the ORT Central Committee, which by this time had been transferred from Petrograd to Moscow, telegraphed to Berlin for ‘an urgent transfer of funds for the purchase of early seed in the provinces’. Fortunately, on 1 March the steamer Makedonia ‘arrived in Odessa with vegetable seed … and implements’, and by March 15 the receipt was awaited of ‘300 million roubles, of which 132 million was coming through the agency of L. Ioffe from the the Central Executive of the ORT Union’. Nor were the artisans forgotten. In that year of 1922 the Paris committee of the ORT Union donated to the Kharkov and Kiev committees of the Soviet ORT ‘146 cases of craftsmen’s tools and 50 anvils, value 84,000 francs’.

From reading these documents one might get the impression that the question of whether or not to co-operate with Soviet Russia had already been decided in the affirmative, and that the leadership of the ORT Union had no doubts on the matter. However, this is far from being the case.

G. Aronson, of whom mention has already been made, in his memoirs devotes a large portion of his account of those years to describing the complications and difficulties experienced by the ORT Union with its work in the USSR. He writes: ‘At this time there was a “Russian commission”, as we called it, working at ORT … I attended the meetings of this commission, where more than once the discussions took on a sharply polemical character: anything concerning Russia always produced dissension and strife.

There was always a “left” atmosphere, given expression by the ORT leaders, especially D. Lvovich, the former Territorialist, who saw in Russia’s Jewish colonies a favourable prospect for the realizing of his cherished ideas.

I remember how once during an argument he cried out passionately: “What are you talking of — freedom, democracy! Someday there will be democracy in Russia. But it is even more important not to let slip this historical chance which has been granted to the Jews in Russia: land for colonisation, and free of charge! Such a chance comes once in a hundred years, and it would be a sin not to make use of it…”’

At the beginning of 1923, in his new capacity, J. Tsegelnitski left for Moscow. There, finally, after overcoming every bureaucratic obstacle, an official agreement with the Central Committee of Soviet ORT was concluded. This was doubtless made possible by the renewal of diplomatic relations with Germany in accordance with the Treaty of Rapallo of 1922. Due to this agreement, the World ORT Union was able to interact with the various Soviet establishments directly, without mediators such as international charitable organisations that were trusted by the Soviet Government, for instance, the Nansen Organisation of the All-European assistance for the starving people in Russia. According to this agreement, the Central Board of the Soviet ORT undertook to ‘finance the activity of ORT in the USSR in the spheres of agriculture, professional training and the routine work of resettlement … in the sum of not less than 140 thousand dollars a year.’

To judge from the printed records, the new plenipotentiary representative was from his first days in Moscow actively involved in working to improve the organisational structure of Soviet ORT and the financing of its projects. According to the results of an investigation into Jewish professional education in Soviet Russia, carried out by workers of EKO in 1923, in the comparatively large cities of Russia there were 56 professional schools in existence, with 3,686 students, and at least 20 more in smaller localities. … Since 1918 ORT had played a role in the fate of these schools, particularly in Ukraine, where it had frequently covered the schools’ entire running costs. In these accounts it was noted that in 1923 alone, in 29 schools of professional training supported by ORT in Ukraine, 1,215 children were receiving instruction. Among them was an agricultural school in Novopoltavka, restored with ORT funds, which had suffered serious damage during the Civil War. According to the records of the World ORT Union, in 1923 alone 58,000 dollars were expended on the development of professional-technical education in the USSR.

In May 1923 there took place in Moscow the first combined meeting of the leaders of the Jewish section of Narkomnats with the administrators of ORT, JDC and other Jewish organisations. Various means were discussed of attracting the Jewish population to agriculture. In a resolution of the meeting it was noted that the resettlement of Jews in the southern regions of Ukraine and the Crimea, with the aim of founding new Jewish agricultural colonies, was not only socio-economically but also politically significant. In December of the following year the Council of People’s Commissars ratified the statutes of OZET — the voluntary Obshchestvo po zemleusroistvu trudyashchikhsya yevreev (Society for Agricultural Settlement of Jewish Workers). At the second session of this organisation, held in Moscow in 1926, the president of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, M. Kalinin, promised in his speech of welcome to found a Jewish republic in the Crimea in the near future. His pronouncements made a deep impression on the members of a delegation from the World ORT Union who were present, headed by A. Syngalowski.

By the mid-1920s Jewish agricultural colonisation in the USSR had taken on — under the slogan ‘To the Jewish homeland!’ — the features of a grandiose project, its scope exceeding that of all previous such enterprises, from Argentina to Eretz Israel. It seemed that this ‘historical chance granted to the Jews in Russia’ would very soon be realised.