Report on Ukraine

Moscow.

The difficult situation in numerous Jewish townships in the Ukraine, as pictured by local correspondents in the Soviet Jewish press, has moved Communist headquarters in the Ukraine to send out four investigating commissions to look into the position of the Jewish population there, especially in the region of Vinice, which is thickly populated with Jews.

Each of the investigating commissions was sent to a different district, so that the investigation should be as comprehensive as possible. They selected various types of townships, industrial and agricultural colonies, places where the majority of the population are artisans, and townships which have no sharply defined economic character. They investigated a territory which has more than 400,000 Jews.

TOWNSHIPS REVEAL CHANGED STRUCTURE

According to the reports of these four commissions to the Vinice Regional Party Committee, the Jewish township as such has undergone a complete change of structure. Towns which were previously trading centers, are now productive centers. The majority of the Jewish population, previously traders and middlemen, are now workers. There is hardly a township without a collective farm settlement on its outskirts, and its artisan cooperatives. Many of them have factories and works in which the majority of the Jewish population are employed.

But the Jewish population is far from having been absorbed in productive work, the reports indicate. In some townships, the local leaders have recently stopped the introduction of Jews into productive work. There have been cases where the leaders of local enterprises have dismissed Jewish workers, ostensibly because they are not physically equal to the work. In several places they have even stopped taking young Jews into the factory schools.

90 COLLECTIVES IN VINICE REGION

The position of the Jewish collective farm settlements outside the towns is by no means satisfactory, all the reports agree. There are in the Vinice Region ninety Jewish collective farm settlements, with thousands of Jewish collective farmers. Some of them have been in existence for ten years, yet most of them are in a state of distress. In the opinion of the investigators, the reason is that most of them are situated too far outside the towns. Many of them are about ten kilometres away, and the collective farmers have to commute to their homes in the townships.

The village collective farmer has his own vegetable garden, cow, sheep, poultry, etc., while the town collective farmer has nothing, not even a hen. The town collective farms concentrate on growing corn, which does not pay on such small plots of land. And they are crushed under the accumulated debt accruing to the State for their agricultural inventory. The non-Jewish peasant came to the collective farm bringing with him his own inventory, and to a large extent also his own cattle. The Jew, on the other hand, was in most cases one of the declassed, and came with empty hands, so that he now has to pay heavily for the entire inventory provided to equip his collective farm.

The result is that there is very little left even for those who are at work for 300 or more days in the year.

In some places, the reports state, conditions are even worse, because of the impossible attitude adopted by the local authorities.

GROUP ‘SIX’ FREQUENTLY SHIFTED

In the township of Bar, for instance, the Jewish collective group “Six” has been shifted time after time from one plot to another. The machine tractor station, in addition, compelled the collective to sell fifteen heads of its pedigree cattle, a third of its entire live stock, in order to pay it for ploughing the land.

Such things, the commissions complain, result in many settlers leaving the collective farms. In Ostropol, for instance, there were 166 Jewish families in the collective farm in 1930. Today there are only eighty-three. Nor are conditions particularly good in the artisan cooperatives, the reports reveal. Many of them, tailoring, shoemaking, capmaking and other cooperatives, suffer from a lack of raw material, with the result that many of the members quit. On the other hand cooperatives using locally-obtained raw material, cooperatives of coopers, cabinetmakers, etc., have plenty for their work, and the members make a good living.

COOPERATIVES ARE OFTEN DISSOLVED

The artisan cooperatives, too, it is reported by the investigators suffer in a number of towns on account of the irresponsible conduct of affairs by the local leaders. Often the cooperatives are dissolved, and the artisans do not even get their tools returned. That happened, for instance, in Ostropol.

All four commissions are as one in claiming that if the local artisan organizations showed more initiative, and interested themselves to a greater extent in the welfare of the artisans, it would be possible to provide the cooperatives in most cases with local raw material, so that they would not meet with constant difficulty in their work.

As for the cultural work, the commissions all agree that it lags. Except for the school, they say, there is no cultural activity at all, and the result is that the clericals are very busy in the townships. Rabbis write begging letters to America, and are sent dollars which remain in their pockets. Rabbis, cantors, etc., are maintained by the towns. The township of Shadowe, for example, with eighty-five Jewish families, of whom seventy-four are in the local collective farm, keeps a rabbi, a cantor, a shochet and even a melamed, who has a cheder, which is conducted almost openly. The best building in the township is the Beth Medrash. The only change in Shadowe, says the report, is that the best seat on the Eastern wall