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Over one and one-half million Jews in Eastern Europe are being afforded means of livelihood through the extension of small credits by cooperatives fostered and subsidized by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, according to a report by David M. Bressler, a member of the executive committee of that organization, and Joseph C. Hyman, its executive secretary, which was made public yesterday.
Messrs. Bressler and Hyman recently toured thirteen Eastern European countries on behalf of the Joint Distribution Committee to ascertain the present status of the Jews there and the effectiveness of the institutions set up by the Joint Distribution Committee for the reconstruction of the devastated Jewish communities. The countries they visited included Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, the four major sections of Roumania, and Sub-Carpathia and East Slovakia in Czecho-Slovakia.
Their investigation embraced not only the credit cooperatives in these countries, but also the free loan societies conducted by the J. D. C. in Poland, which are the economic bulwark of another 500,000 people whose borrowing capacity is below that of the members of the cooperatives.
“For the Jews of Eastern Europe, the war is by no means over,” Messrs. Bressler and Hyman report. “It has been succeeded throughout Eastern Europe by a war after the war, in its economic implications for the Jews, which we fear will continue for many years to come. What saves large masses of the Jewish population from total economic collapse is twofold: the aid rendered by relatives through remittances, and the much stronger organized economic instrumentalities for a self-help through united cooperative action.
“The Jewish credit societies are today, in our opinion, the very life blood of the bulk of Eastern Jewry and constitute the greatest defensive as well as constructive medium for their preservation. Credits have been advanced to 305,000 individuals, each responsible for the support of a family of from four to five persons are members of these cooperatives.”
The joint Reconstruction Foundation which took over the credit work of the Joint Distribution Committee in 1924, now contributes funds to 690 cooperative credit societies over a wide territory including Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Roumania, and Czecho-Slovakia. The figures in the report show that in membership and in number of societies, the credit cooperative movement has more than doubled during the past five years. The Jewish Colonization Association is associated with the Joint Distribution Committee in the Foundation.
“The Joint Distribution Committee officers reognize that the cooperatives directly and indirectly reach into and strengthen the lives and livelihood of over a million and a half of the Jews of Eastern Europe currently and constantly,” declared the investigators. “But to us the interesting factor is not so much the aid by the Foundation itself, and that has been substantial, as the strenuous effort of the Jewish populations themselves to solidify and make permanent these cooperatives by putting into them every available cent of their sorely-tried resources.”
One of the most important projects the Foundation maintains in Poland is the network of Free Loan Societies which provides loans averaging from $11 to $16 for the group which earnestly labors to maintain itself, but is one degree lower in the economic scale than those able to borrow from the credit cooperatives.
Today in Poland, Messrs. Bressler and Hyman report, “545 of these Free Loan Societies serve regularly no less than 100,000 individuals, heads of families of from four to five, in towns and sections where approximately 80% of the Jewish population of Poland lives.” The Free Loan Societies and the credit cooperatives in Poland, taken together, serve 200,000 families, or approximately 1,000,000 individuals.
The credit cooperatives in Austria, Turkey and Latvia are declared by the Joint Distribution Committee officers to be the only media for cheap credits the Jewish population there possess. In Czecho-Slovakia, the cooperatives, together with the institutions for child care of the Joint, form the centers for all Jewish social work.
“That this beneficent piece of constructive activity must be enlarged and extended, seems to us to be a self-evident fact,” write Mr. Bressler and Mr. Hyman. “The value of the cooperative movement, stimulated and sustained by the J. D. C., the Ica, and the Foundation, can scarcely be overstated. No other instrumentality has yet been developed which has succeeded in bringing about a union of the local forces of Jewry in Eastern Europe, has so effectively enlisted foreign Jewish aid in the cause of economic reconstruction, and has so intelligently exerted an influence, direct and indirect, upon the governments and municipalities of those lands in behalf of the Jewish populations.”
Commenting on the recommendation that the credit-cooperatives and free loan work in Eastern Europe must be enlarged and extended, Paul Baerwald, treasurer of that organization, expressed the hope yesterday that this would become possible through the fund-raising efforts recently launched by the Allied Jewish Campaign, from which the Joint Distribution Committee is to receive $3,500,000. A very large part of this sum, Mr. Baerwald said, would be utilized for that purpose.
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