The Jewish Telegraphic Agency learns today from reliable sources that the Soviet government is considering permitting the organization of special artels (cooperative factories) of Jewish artisans, who, as ex-traders, were expelled from the regular artels which are provided with work by the government cooperatives. The project will be realized on condition that the American Ort, the society for the promotion of technical trades among the Jews of Eastern Europe, provides such former traders with raw materials.
If the project is carried out, it will be a tremendous relief for the expelled artisans, for it will give them all of the legal rights of artisans in dwellings and taxes, it will solve their unemployment problem and it will make them independent of the government cooperatives, which make a sharp distinction in granting raw materials between those artisans who were artisans before the Revolution and those artisans who prior to 1917 were traders. This project will open up a wide field of new activity for the Ort.
Should this plan for special artels of Jewish artisans be consummated, it will mean the end to a situation which to the expelled artisans has been tragic. On the one hand, the government has been coercing all artisans into joining cooperatives, and on the other hand the Jewish Communists have been actively engaged in demanding the expulsion of the Jewish artisans who were once traders. The government’s desire to reduce the number of declassed, a majority of whom are Jews, by organizing them in cooperatives, has been opposed by the action of the Yevsektzia, the Jewish section of the Communist Party, and its organ, the “Emes,” who insisted on
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(Continued from Page 1) again reducing to the declassed status those Jews who had emerged from that class and were regarded as bona-fide workers who had already become part of the Soviet industrial machine. It is this housecleaning, which has been under way for some time, together with the suffering it has created, that will be ended, or at least mitigated, by this new plan of the Soviet government.
Only yesterday an official proclamation by the White Russian Central Committee of the Communist Party had declared that all declassed Jews who are ex-traders, rabbis, cantors or other religious officials, will be cleaned out from the mutual credit loan societies. The chief sufferers from this proclamation will be many Jewish artisans, since the Yevsektzia declared that only those who are entitled to participate in Soviet elections may belong to the credit associations, and many Jewish artisans are disenfranchised because they were formerly traders.
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.
