From 1935 the lion’s share of the donations collected by the World ORT Union was utilised for the establishment and development of Birobidzhan. The notion that ORT would take part ‘in organising work in the sphere of the industrialisation of the Birobidzhan region’ appeared in the pages of Tribuna in mid-1928. Admittedly, this declaration was premature, since the plans for the mass resettlement of Jews in the Far East did not, at first, command the approval of the leaders of the World ORT Union’s Central Committee, or of the leaders of other Jewish charitable organisations.

Only after 7 May 1934, when by a decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee the Birobidzhan region of the Soviet Far East was transformed into the Jewish Autonomous Region, did this project become popular with Jewish communities abroad. It seemed that the slogan employed by the Communist regime — ‘Jewish land, a Jewish country!’ — was at last beginning to come to life.

At the very beginning of 1934 a representative delegation was sent to Birobidzhan which included J. Tsegelnitski and A. Vainshtein of the ORT Union and Dr D. Rosen of Agro-Joint. They were to assess whether the remote territory earmarked for the Jewish Autonomous Region was suitable for Jewish colonisation. The members of the delegation visited just about all the inhabited places of the region that were considered as having the potential for industrial and agricultural development: Birobidzhan, Valdgeim, Birofeld, Bidzhan, Stalinfeld, Yekaterino-Nikolsk, the Pokrovsk and Volochaevsk sovkhozes, the communes of Ikor, Londoko, Birakan, Kuldur. The delegates ‘made themselves familiar with the situation of the settlers, with the state of their settlements and farms, with the land, the work and the prospects.’ Following his journey J. Tsegelnitski prepared a report of his findings for the ORT Union’s Central Board. His general conclusions were as follows: ‘The actual difficulties involved in opening up the economy of Birobidzhan are considerably less than they appeared to be, on the basis of reports read and conversations held before our journey. The improvement of the land is not so difficult as it seemed. Enormous possibilities are opening up in the field of wood manufacture…’

Nevertheless, a majority of the Central Committee of the World ORT Union preferred to play a waiting game. A. Syngalowski recommended setting up a special commission to look into the question, whose task would be to collect exhaustive materials on Birobidzhan, and D. Lvovich called for Dr D. Rosen, the Agro-Joint director, to be invited to give his views on the matter.

On January 8 a meeting of the executive committee of the ORT Union was held in Paris, at which a decision had to be made. J. Tsegelnitski was full of enthusiasm, Dr D. Rosen rather more sceptical, reminding those present that the realisation of the Birobidzhan project would require vast amounts of capital investment. The upshot was that a decision was taken to support the establishment of Jewish autonomy in Birobidzhan. It is possible that a significant factor in this decision was the ORT Union leaders’ intention to organise the resettlement in the Jewish Autonomous Region of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany.

Soon another important fact emerged: a year before, J. Tsegelnitski had already allocated substantial funds from the ORT budget for the construction of a plywood factory in Birobidzhan. It is not known whether he did this on his own initiative or with the knowledge of someone in the ORT Union leadership. Leon Shapiro, in his monograph on the history of ORT, says that ‘Tsegelnitski, a Soviet citizen, did not have much choice’.

In the ‘Brief sketch of ORT activity in the USSR’ which we have already had occasion to cite more than once, prepared by the ORT Union for Sovnarkom in January 1938, we find the following in connection with its work in the Jewish Autonomous Region: ‘The activity [of ORT in Birobidzhan — A. I.] was directed primarily, in line with the policy of industrialisation by means of technical assistance and the provision of credit, towards the construction of factories and workshops useful to the Jewish Autonomous Region. In the past two years it has been concerned with the agricultural settlements of Birobidzhan, and has taken the form of organising subsidiary enterprises and the introduction of intensive cultivation. A number of presently operating factories and workshops (producing furniture, plywood, clothing and so on) have been founded or reorganised thanks to the equipment and technical instruction provided from abroad by ORT’.

The document in question is indeed extremely brief, because apart from the enterprises mentioned in it, other factories and plants — large by the standards of the time — were built in the Jewish Autonomous Region with funds from ORT: for example, cedar-oil and timber-chemical plants, brickworks, the ‘Detal’ saw-mill, and the haberdashery factory in Birobidzhan.

The Dimitrov furniture factory deserves special mention. Its bentwood furniture section was already fully functional in 1937, and its cabinet furniture section was being rebuilt with the technical and financial support of the World ORT Union. When the factory was visited by a delegation of furniture-makers from Leningrad, their delight was unbounded. As one of the members of the delegation told a Tribuna correspondent: ‘In the skill of its workforce and in the quality of its products, the bentwood furniture factory in Birobidzhan scores over some of the factories of Moscow and Leningrad.’ Numerous photographs of the bentwood furniture section graced the pages of many issues of Tribuna, clearly showing that in the production of ‘Viennese’ chairs the masters of Birobidzhan had reached unheard-of heights. And this was indeed so, for from 1931 a large part of the Dimitrov factory’s production of ‘Viennese’ chairs was imported into China.

Another exemplary industrial establishment financed by the World ORT Union was the marble factory at Birakan. At the end of the 1920s important marble deposits had been discovered between the stations of Londoko and Birakan, but the means to develop them had been lacking. They began to be worked in 1930, but on a small scale, by craftsmen. In 1936 the industrial working of the native marble of Birakan began, with the construction of a plant with financial and technical assistance from the ORT Union. Ultimately the plant’s products proved to be of such high quality that Birakan marble was used for the facing of several halls in the Moscow metro.

Much attention was paid to the development of craft industries in the agricultural colonies of Birobidzhan. By 1936 knitting and hat-making workshops had been organised by ORT in Birofeld, Valdheim, Yekaterino-Nikolsk, Alexeevka, Amurzet and Samara; they employed about 200 people, most of them women.

In all, thanks to the activity of the World ORT Union in the Jewish Autonomous Region in 1935–1936, more than 1,500 Jewish settlers found work in the enterprises and construction sites of Birobidzhan.