Half Century of Zionist Activity: Mr. Ussischkin Head of Jewish National Fund Celebrates His Zionist

Mr. Menachem Mendel Ussischkin, the head of the Jewish National Fund, and one of the leaders of the Hibath Zion movement before the foundation of the Zionist Organisation by Dr. Theodore Herzl, is to-day celebrating the completion of 50 years of Zionist work. Messages of congratulation have been conveyed to him to-day by the Jewish National Fund headquarters here, the Keren Hayesod, and other institutions engaged in the Palestine upbuilding work. Many telegrams and messages from abroad have also arrived.

Mr. Ussischkin, who was born in Dubrovna, in the Province of Mohilev, in Russia, on August 14th., 1863, and is therefore in his 69th. year, joined the Hovevei Zion movement when he was 19 years of age, while he was still a student of engineering at the Moscow Technical School. He threw himself into the movement with enthusiasm and was one of the organisers of the Bilu group, the first settlers who went out to Palestine. He founded the B’nai Zion student group in Moscow, and became a member of Achad Ha’am’s League, the B’nai Moshe.

When Dr. Theodore Herzl founded the Zionist Organisation Mr. Ussischkin joined him and went to Basle as one of the delegates to the First Zionist Congress. As one of the leaders of the Russian Zionists, he always stood for the urgent need of immediate colonisation in Palestine, and on the Greater Actions Committee, to which he was elected at the Third Congress, he opposed his colonisation plans to Dr. Herzl’s insistence on political Zionism.

At the time of the Uganda scheme, Mr. Ussischkin organised all the adherents of Palestine Zionism, the so-called Zion Zionists, and he was the leader of the “no-sayers” at the Seventh Zionist Congress, who voted against the acceptance of the British offer of Uganda, and headed the opposition to Herzl. He was the initiator of the Harkoff Conference against territorialism held in 1903, and of the Kiev Conference of the Zion Zionists. In 1906 he became the head of the Odessa Committee, retaining the post until the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917.

During the February Revolution he took an active part in the work of the Jewish National Councils in the Ukraine and was elected President of the Preparatory Conference of the Jewish Communities of the Ukraine. As a pronounced Hebraist, he roused as President of the Jewish National Assembly in Kiev the hostility of the Yiddishist Democratic and Socialist parties. He left Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution in October, and in 1919 he was one of the members of the Zionist delegation which went to the Peace Conference at Versailles to urge the Zionist claims to Palestine.

After the early period of the Zionist Commissions in Palestine the reins of the Zionist work there were finally taken in 1919 by Mr. Ussischkin, and until the Thirteenth Zionist Congress in 1923 he was the head of the Zionist Palestine Executive.

After that he assumed his present position as head of the Jewish National Fund, in which capacity he has worked indefatigably for the acquisition of more land in Palestine as Jewish inalienable possession.

During the Sixteenth Zionist Congress in Zurich in 1929, when the question of the independence of the Jewish National Fund came up, Mr. Ussischkin insisted hotly that the Jewish National Fund must be an independent institution. Its object, he said, is to establish a land reserve uninfluenced by the colonisation policy of the Zionist Executive, and it was only because it had an independent policy that the Fund had succeeded in making so many important land purchases in recent years.