Successful Resettlement of Evacuated Jews Reported from Siberia and Volga Region

Highlights of the successful resettlement of thousands of Jewish evacuees from the Ukraine upon land in the Soviet interior in villages from the Volga to Siberia – were made public today by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee here.

Forty Jewish collective farms from the Kherson region were transferred, look, stock and barrel, to Siberia. Agricultural machinery, cattle, seed, feed and other farming equipment and supplies were taken along. Only the bare land was left to the Nazis. Several individual groups of Jewish farmers from the Ukraine have been settled in the Saratov region on the Volga. One of them, headed by the former chairman of a collective farm, Mendel Levin, is tilling the land at Petropavlovsk.

Jews who previously had no knowledge of the land are also working on farms in the Saratov district. Moishe Borukhovitch, a fifty-six-year-old postal employee from Dniepropertrovsk is one of the most active workers on the collective farm at Kurilovka. The Shenker family from Ismeal in Bessarabia are in the Bessonovka collective. Several of the women in the family work as milk-maids, others as tractor drivers and field hands; and the men are training to be chauffeurs and operators of other farm machinery.

Evacuated Jews are continuing their work and learning new skills in other fields besides agriculture, the committee stated. Reports reaching here from Namangan, one of the principal cities in the Uzbek Republic, disclose that among the many evacuees who have been settled there are Jewish artists, writers, composers and scientists. The composer Hirshfield has been studying Uzbek music and folk melodies and has prepared two musical spectacles for the theatre. The architect Rotatsch has unearthed much interesting data concerning Uzbek architecture. A great sensation has been aroused by discoveries on the functioning of the central nervous system by the Moscow scientist Fibrholt.