Julius Rosenwald’s $5,000,000 Contribution Viewed As Dramatic Event of Age

Julius Rosenwald’s $5,000,000 contribution for extending the Jewish colonization work in Russia is viewed as one of the major dramatic events of our age in an editorial of “The Nation.”

“Ours is a dramatic age,” the paper writes, “and among its major dramas are its charities. A Lindbergh winging his way across the sea would have seemed a mad dream a century ago; but no more mad than an oil millionaire building a modern hospital in Peking or a mail-order magnate turning over five million dollars to help settle Jewish colonists in the Ukraine and the Crimea. Julius Rosenwald has used his profits well, as hundreds of schools for Negroes in our own South attest; and he has been generous to his own people. It was he, if we remember aright, who startled a meeting to raise funds for Jewish charities a few years ago by rising from the floor and announcing calmly: ‘I’ll give a million dollars.’

“The work of the American Jewish Joint Agricultural Corporation, of which James N. Rosenberg of New York is chairman, is a stirring adventure. In Czarist days the Russian Jews were herded into city ghettoes, and the legend grew up that the sons of the hill-dwellers of Palestine were essentially an urban people. Within the last five years the ‘Agrojoint,’ with the cooperation of the Russian Government, has helped more than 100,000 Russian Jews to settle on more than one million acres in South Russia, and most of them, already self-supporting, are disproving the charge that Jews cannot produce on the soil. Nor is this work merely sectarian; more than 80,000 non-Jewish farmers have also been aided by the Agrojoint. The project has not the romantic appeal of the return to the homeland of Palestine, but it has a sounder economic basis. The difficulties come at the start; and Julius Rosenwald’s great five-million-dollar gift, which must be matched by an equal sum from other contributors, will overcome them.”