Ten Percent of All Jewish Dp’s in U.S. Settled on Farms. J.a.s. Reports

Despite the fact that the number of farmers in the United States has been declining in recent years, nearly 10 percent of all the Jewish displaced persons who arrived here since the end of the war have embraced farming according to the 1955 annual report of the Jewish Agricultural Society issued here today.

About 23,000 families of Jewish Displaced Persons have come into this country since the end of the Second World War and it is estimated that over 2,000 of them have settled successfully on farms, mostly for the production of eggs, broilers and milk. A great majority of these settlements were in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and in Southern and Central California.

Summarizing the work of the Society, which was established in 1900 by the Baron De Hirsch Fund to foster agriculture among Jews in America, Theodore Norman, general manager, states that the rehabilitation of these newest immigrants, victims of the Nazis, was the most important phase of the organization’s work. The Society in the last decade directly settled 1,452 families, of whom 830 came from the ranks of displaced persons. An even larger number of new arrivals, not being immediately in need of direct financial aid from the JAS, or receiving loans from other sources, became farmers, generally in areas which were pioneered by the Society. During the last ten years the Society granted 2,391 loans and since its inception the Society’s loans have totaled about $13,000,000.

The report features another decennial–a decade of activity of the Society’s Western States Office in Los Angeles, California. A total of 396 families were settled by that office as farmers, mostly in California, with loans amounting to $822,102.