Jewish Agricultural Colonies in Ukraine - my family

One of the unanswered questions in my family’s history was why so many Jews left Lithuania and moved to Ukraine in 1880-1925. Ukraine certainly had richer agriculture and a more tolerable climate, but I would have thought that no-one leaves their homeland easily. My grandfather offered only one clue; when passengers alighted from their commuter trains at central Lithuanian railway stations, they were often handed advertising pamphlets about moving to bigger, bolder, warmer, happier Ukrainian towns.

"The Study of the Jewish Agricultural Colonies in the Ukraine" was written by my cousin Chaim Freedman and published in Israel in 2005. Chaim wrote that in the late C18th, large areas of territories in south-east Ukraine came under the control of the Russian Tsarist regime. This area was then known as Novorussia (New Russia) and was divided rough­ly into 3 Guberniyas-provinces: Kherson, Yekater­in­oslav and Tavritch (including the Crimean peninsula and part of the adjacent mainland). By the C19th, the Russian government was anxious to develop this region by families moved from other parts of the Russian Empire. 

One of  my mother's uncles had this farm, Grafskoy. 1912.

At the same time the government sought a way to relieve itself of the so-called Jewish Question, particularly in what are now Lithuania, Latvia and Belarus. With the accession of Tsar Alexander I in 1801, legislat­ion was pass­ed to define and partially relieve the situation of the Jews. One stated ob­jective of this legislation was to encourage Jews to leave the crowd­ed and economically poor cities in the north and est­ablish new agricultural settlements in Novorussia. Those Jews who qualified were promised financial support to set up agricul­tur­al colonies, with the added incentive of exemption from military service. This was a very well-motivated plan.

Initially, a number of agricultural colonies were established in Kher­son Guberniya. In 1846, when new colonies were established,  the first group of Jewish colonists set off from the rallying point in Mogilev and headed for a region in Yekaterinoslav Guberniya. This group was subdivided according to town of origin. Several convoys underwent the arduous journey by river and by wagon. The 285 families were divided into 6 colonies. Subsequently 16 other colonies were established by the late 1860s. By the late C19th the Yekaterin­oslav colonies comprised about 20,000 Jews.

The chosen region was just north of the Sea of Azov, and the col­onies were situated in two districts, Alexand­rovsk and Mariupol. Life in the colonies peaked during the period of the second half of the C19th, until the tragic destruction of Civil War Russia in 1917-1921. After the Civil War, Chaim said, most of the colonies were revamped by the Soviet regime and functioned as collectives, incorp­orated as the Nei-Zlatopol Jewish Autonomous Reg­ion. (This unique episode in Jewish history ended with the Nazis).

The Jewish urban communities in Yekaterinoslav Guberniya were estab­lished on a very small scale alongside the colonies. As time passed and many families found themselves unsuited to rural life, the urban communities were boosted by many who dropped out of the agricultural colonies. The major communities, aside from Yekaterinoslav the capital, included Alexandrovsk (Zaparozhe), Pavlograd, Orekhov, Tokmak, Melitopol, Berdyansk, Mariupol and others. In effect the original colonists drew in their wake significant numbers of their hometown relatives or neighbours from Lithuania, Latvia and Belarus who constituted the majority in the developing urban communities in Yekaterinoslav.

My grandfather (left front) and his siblings, 

Berdyansk, Dec 1913

Chaim Freedman found only a few sources about this region's Jewish population. English books refer briefly to the region. Most of the other sources are in Russian, particularly a very detailed history of the region which includes many statistical analyses. There is one book in Hebrew devoted to the subject, Khaklaim Yehudiim Bearvot Russia/Jewish Ag­ric­ulturalists on the Russian Steppe, Tel Aviv 1965.

The primary source is in Russian, Yevrei Zyemlyedeltsi-Jewish Agriculturalists 1807-1887 by Viktor Nikitin (Petersburg 1887). This mammoth work explains the sequence of events leading up to the establishment of the colonies, gives details of the organisation and financing of the initial settlement, and includes periodic reports on the development and achievements of the colonies. The reports were prepared by insp­ectors appointed to investigate conditions in the colonies and recommend action by the government. Since considerable funds were allocated by the government, exact statistics were constantly required.

Chaim Freedman believes that the phenomenon of Jewish agricultural settlement in an organised form is still of great importance; only thus can we under­stand the endeavours of many Jews to improve their social and economic situation under a sometimes oppressive Tsarist regime. Their efforts were part of a unique episode in the st­ruggle for Jewish survival in the Diaspora, at a time when the restrictive Pale of Settlement legislation was still in place.

Examine some results. In 1869 the Ministry of Domains instituted an inquiry respecting the Jewish settlers of the New Russian colonies, in order to ascertain how many of them really occupied themselves with agriculture and how many were indigent and worthless. As a result, in the course of ten years 10,359 men, women and children were expelled from the class of agriculturalists. In 1874 all reserve lands, which had been counted as part of the colonies, were taken away from them."

"These results were the more remarkable because it was in 1881 that the colonies received the greatest check to their development by the riots, which actually reached the colonies Kherson and Bessarabia and disturbed the sense of security in all the rest. Several of the best Jewish farmers in Bessarabia emigrated in that year to the USA and Palestine. "The May Laws of 1882 (put into application in 1891) influenced the development of the Agricultural Colonies of Russia only indirectly. They put a stop to all immigration of the Jewish inhabitants of the towns into the villages, and indeed sent no less that 50,000 form the villages into the towns. By this means the development of agricultural tastes among the Russian Jews was effectively arrested.

   Chaim’s family, and mine, settled in Mariupol, Berdyansk (both in red) 

and Grafskoy (marked G and now called Proletars'ke) in Central North Ukraine.
I have added cousin Ron's family's home in Andreevka/Donetz (in red)
Click on map to see the details

"But the Agricultural Colonies were particularly exempted from the operation of these enactments. In 1880 a fund to promote handicraft and agriculture among the Russian Jews was initiated, with a capital of 200,000 rubles. In 1887 the amount of this fund (1.1m rubles) was turned over to the general fund of the government treasury. In 1891 an agricultural school, affiliated with the Jewish Orphan Asylum was opened at Odessa. In 1899 the government granted Baron Gunzburg permission to found a Jewish Agricultural colony on his estate in the district of Bendery, government of Bessarabia. The colony is called Rossianka, and covers 500 deciatines of land, of which 400 are under cultivation, each farmer being entitled to 20. The remaining 100 deciatines are reserved for a common pasture and for futures enlargements of farms. All the settlers, except soldiers that have served their time, must be graduates of some agricultural school; and all storekeepers must be Christians. 

In 1900 according to the latest reports, there were more that 100,000 Jewish agriculturalists in Russia cultivating their own farms, 60,000 of whom are settled in 170 colonies. In South Russia, Jews in great numbers seek work on Christian estates and find employment there. In Siberia, especially in the district of Krasnoyarsk, there are numerous Jewish agriculturalists who have established themselves on single farms; and, except as to their religion, they differ little form the general mass of the peasants."

Not everyone was happy with the agricultural settlements. The worst anti-Jewish pogrom in the beautiful city of Odessa’s history happened in October 1905 when Christian Russians and Ukrainians massacred 400+ Jews and damaged or destroyed 1600+ Jewish homes, farms and businesses. In tiny Mariupol in October 1905, 21 Jews were killed in the town and many of the Jewish shops and houses were looted. Very close to Odessa, pogroms took place twice in Kishinev, then the capital of the Bessarabia province of the Russian Empire: once in April 1903 and a second time in October 1905. However I believe most of these pogroms were part of the larger number of pogroms that engulfed the Russian lands after the October Manifesto of 1905.