An official report just published here laid bare the failure of the movement to attract Jewish settlers to Bureya, the Jewish autonomous region in Siberia.
For 1933, the report stated, a quota of 25,000 Jewish colonists was set. Later this quota was cut down to 17,000 and in the last half of the year the quota was still further lowered to 7,000, but even this was not filled. For the fourth quarter of 1933, it had been planned to send out 3,000 colonists, but only 498 went to Bureya.
Some 3,190 colonists, comprising 622 families and 892 single persons, actually emigrated to Bureya in 1933, according to the report. No foreign Jewish Colonists, save those on the way to join families in Bureya were included in the total for the year.
Not all the families who planned to go to Bureya reached there. More than forty families were sent back when they reached Moscow because they were found to be unfit for settlement work. Other families were sent back when they reached Bureya, while many left the region because they were dissatisfied with conditions there.
In discussing the gloomy report of Bureya colonization work, the Moscow Yiddish daily, Emes, places the blame squarely on the shoulders of the local branches of the Ozet and Comzet, Jewish colonization groups, declaring that local branches in a number of towns and cities in the centers of Jewish population like Kamnetz, Podolsk, Vinitza, Odessa and others would have to answer for their criminal neglect in the courts.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
