Demand of Joint Distribution Committee with Regard to Jewish Colonization Work Will Be Granted

The demand of the Joint Distribution Committee that it should be allowed to conduct its colonization work in Russia independently will be agreed to, your correspondent learns. A provisional agreement has already been drawn up between the Joint Distribution, Committee’s Agricultural Commission and the Soviet Central Commission for Jewish land settlement to this effect. Under the agreement, the Joint Distribution Committee’s Agricultural Commission will begin with an area of 30,000 desfatin of land (80,000 acres).

The colonist will be allowed every latitude in regard to his acquiring the land and working on it. The Joint Distribution Committee’s Agricultural Commission will grant him a credit loan for a period of ten years and will give him agronomical and legal aid, etc.

It is pointed out also that the Committee for Jewish Land Settlement to which three Jewish Communists, Rachmiel Weinstein. Tchemerinsky and Esther Frumkin have just been appointed, is not the same as the Central Soviet Commission for Jewish Land Settlement of which M. Smidowitch is President which includes among its members several of the principal members of the Soviet Central Government. The Committee is a special body appointed not by the Central Executive Committee of the Federated Soviet Republic, but by the Central Executive Committee of the Russian Soviet Republic only, for the purpose of assisting in the settlement of working-class Jews on the land in the Russian Republic. Weinstern, Tchemerinsky and Frumkin have not been appointed members of the Central Commission for Jewish Colonization of the Federated Soviet Republic, with which alone the Joint Distribution Committee’s Agricultural Commission and any other foreign organizations taking part in the work of Jewish land settlement in Russia will be in contact.