The activities of ORT were covered in the pages of the journal Tribuna yevreiskoi sovetskoi obshchestvennosti (Tribune of Soviet Jewish Community), the OZET official organ. This popular and widely circulated magazine appeared in the USSR from 1927 to 1937.⁵ For the first three years just about every issue had a special feature entitled ‘Inside ORT’, which gave concise information on this organisation’s work in the provinces. The numerous articles, reports, readers’ letters and photographs published in the Tribuna at first gave an adequate enough picture of the wide-ranging activity of Soviet ORT. It should be made clear that almost all ORT programmes in the USSR were developed and financed by the World ORT Union, which the Soviet press at that time usually referred to as the ‘ORT-Farband’ (Yiddish for ‘union’).

The Tribuna was a very well-organised propaganda publication, and attracted many well-known Soviet and foreign journalists, writers, artists and photographers. The principal ideologue and permanent editor of the journal was S. Dimanshtein, a prominent Bolshevik and president of OZET, and a confirmed opponent of Zionism. His leading articles, appearing from one number to the next, constituted distinctive documents in which OZET’s programme, and the duty of its workers, was set out in rigorous terms. The material placed after these leading articles served to clarify, to detail and to illustrate the position of the OZET leadership, and to shape the public opinion of the ‘Jewish masses’; and also, when necessary, to send unambiguous ‘signals’ to anyone who did not align himself with the programme or understood it incorrectly. For reasons which were well understood, the quantity of such signals in the journal’s pages had noticeably increased by the mid-1930s. On the whole, however, the readers of the Tribuna — ordinary Jewish settlers and kolkhoz workers as well as those high up in the Party — should have been convinced that, in spite of any temporary difficulties, the ‘agrarisation’ and ‘productivisation’ of the Jewish population of the Soviet Union was proceeding quite successfully.

The pages of the journal permit us to see what role was allotted to ORT in the USSR’s Jewish resettlement project, and what the Soviet government expected of it. The authors of articles were mostly Soviet functionaries such as Yu. Golde, who at the beginning of the 1920s had assumed the post of president of All-Russian ORT executive, A. Chemerissky, L. Zinger, P. Zelmanovsky and others. They tried through the official press to ‘direct’ the executive workers of the Soviet ORT and to realise, so to speak, its general strategic direction.

In the first short article, under the title ‘What will ORT do?’, published in Tribuna no. 2 of 1927, the basic direction of the society’s activity was formulated: ‘to attract the mass of Jewish workers into industry and craftsmanship, and to reinforce the economy and raise the level of technical instruction in the Jewish agricultural settlements, by means of the spreading and development of intensive cultivation and of agricultural enterprises’, as well as ‘the organisation of vocational studies, the instruction and material support of professional schools and courses for workers and craftsmen’. Another important task of ORT was ‘the systematic investigation of the economic situation of the Jewish population of the USSR’, for which a special statistical-economic commission was set up within the Central Committee of the All-Russian ORT.

In 1926–1927 ORT’s work in the sphere of economic reinforcement of the Jewish agricultural colonies was carried out mainly in the Odessa region and in Belorussia. In the Odessa region alone ORT operated 22 settlements and 1,268 farms, and in Belorussia 26 Jewish kolkhozes and sovkhozes. A member of one of these, B. Levin, who described himself as a worker on the land from the newly-reorganised agricultural collective ‘ORT’, situated ten versts from Mogilev, writes in his report that ‘instead of a run-down farm which did nothing but make a loss, we now have here a seething ant-hill of Jewish workers who perform their tasks in exemplary fashion.’

ORT’s work in the Odessa region was summed up by J. Tsegelnitski in a conversation with a Tribuna correspondent which was published in the eighth issue of the journal for 1927. He observed in particular that: ‘During the present summer ORT has given to a settlement under its care 326 cows, 158 horses, 5 bulls and a considerable quantity of ploughs and other agricultural implements, as well as 50 separators for dairy produce, 2 butter churns and other equipment. ORT has also supplied the settlement with selected seed. … In the present summer alone 422 houses were built here, which may be considered a record number. In the three preceding years of colonisation work 303 houses were built. … Loans for their construction were advanced by Narkomzem (People’s Commissariat of Agriculture) and the Central Board of World ORT Union. … We may mention the settlement of Stalino, where until now there has not been a single house, but now 57 houses are being built; or Kotovsk, where there were 40 houses and now they are building 40 new ones.’

For the fulfilment of this programme a considerable sum was expended: 94,000 roubles, of which 24,000 roubles were spent on construction. Afterwards, admittedly, in a article devoted to the fifth anniversary of the Kotovsk agricultural settlement, one of the Tribuna’s correspondents described ORT’s support as ‘moral rather than material’, printing these words in bold type. Possibly this was one of the first ‘signals’ to the ORT administration that the active participation of their independent public organisation was beginning to annoy the Soviet leadership.

Attracting the mass of Jewish workers into industry and craftsmanship proved particularly successful. Here ORT was able to call on its many years of experience in organising professional-technical education.

With the aim of expanding their activity in the sphere of professional training, All-Russian ORT worked out a detailed plan ‘for attracting the declassed youth of the large and small towns into industry and craft work’. In accordance with this plan, during 1928 alone it was proposed to place 750 unemployed adolescents in various professional and technical courses, to be trained as builders, electricians, textile workers and so on. As a result of the realisation of this plan, in 1937 about 9,000 young people received vocational qualifications.

No less important was the provision to Jewish craftsmen and artisans of the tools and machines necessary to perform their work.

In accordance with the so-called ‘agricultural’ agreement concluded between the Central Board of the World ORT Union and the Soviet government through KOMZET on 9 October 1925, which came into force only half a year after being signed, ORT was allowed to import machines and tools from abroad for agricultural use. Only a small part of the imported equipment was intended for the artisans’ and craftsmen’s associations that were already working. For example, at the beginning of 1928 ORT ‘brought in from abroad knitting machines of the latest type’ with a value of 30,000 roubles for the Samodeyatelnost (Initiative) credit association of Moscow. As a Tribuna correspondent reported: ‘Machines were supplied to 30 exceedingly poor craftsmen’s associations. … As well as knitting machines, machines for producing open-work were also ordered, which arrived in time for the summer and were therefore very well used.’

In order to make it possible for ORT to provide imported means of production not only for artisans’ collectives, but also machines for craftsmen working individually, a new agreement was concluded in May 1928 between KOMZET and the Central Board of the World ORT Union in Berlin. The first clause of this agreement stated: ‘The government permits the Central Board to import from abroad into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics machines, tools, materials and other means of production and to distribute them on the internal market … for the following purposes: (a) for the assistance of organisations or for the helping of co-operatives performing treatment work as well as other industrial enterprises in the regions of the Jewish agricultural settlements; (b) for the assistance of organisations or for the helping of productive associations of Jewish craftsmen in the cities and towns; (c) for enabling individuals to perform productive labour, with preference given to those individuals wishing to make use of the provided means of production on a collective basis.’

Thus the scope of ORT’s activities also included the servicing of individual artisans. For the most part these were religious Jews who were impelled by the precepts of Judaism to observe the Sabbath and the Jewish festivals. From the beginning of the 1920s, in accordance with the anti-religious campaign pursued by the Soviet state, in many state enterprises the day of rest was deliberately fixed on Monday. And from 1929 the so-called ‘six-day week’ — i.e. five days of work and a sixth of rest — was introduced everywhere; it bore no relation to the calendar week and religious observances were not taken into account at all. Because of this, religious Jews could not work in Soviet enterprises or collectives and brought their work home. A significant number of them received some financial support from their relatives living abroad. Now, thanks to the World ORT Union, they also had the opportunity of obtaining imported machines and equipment for their domestic industries, which, in turn, opened up for many craftsmen working from home new possibilities for the development of their work. For such individual ‘licensed’ workers, as well as for co-operative associations, it was possible to arrange the working week as they saw fit. As Yu. Golde observed in his article ‘Bringing machines to the craftsmen’: ‘Financial support in our view is not as effective as active, working support.’