Entry selected by Krzysztof Tyszka from the book “Nazi-Looted Jewish Archives in Moscow. A guide to Jewish Historical and Cultural Collections in the Russian State Military Archive”, ed. by D. E. Fishman, M. Kupovetsky, V. Kuzelenkov
The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) is an American Jewish charitable organization founded in November 1914 at the initiative of Jacob Schiff. The JDC was formed by uniting three American Jewish organizations: the American Jewish Relief Committee, the Central Relief Committee, and the People's Relief Committee. The organization's original title was the Joint Distribution Committee of American Funds for the Relief of Jewish War Sufferers; the name American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee was adopted in 1924. The JDC's aim is to provide material assistance to Jewish communities throughout the world. The European bureau of the JDC was created in late 1920 in Berlin, and was headed by Dr. Bernard Kahn. When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, the bureau was transferred to Paris. Kahn was responsible for JDC activities in Central and Eastern Europe, and the bureau supported medical care, schools and education, social welfare, loans, vocational training, and other services, particularly in Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Lithuania. After 1933, it provided relief to Jews in Nazi Germany. Upon Nazi Germany's invasion of France in 1940, the European bureau was evacuated to Angers and Bordeaux.
Nazi-Looted Jewish Archives in Moscow. A guide to Jewish Historical and Cultural Collections in the Russian State Military Archive, ed. by D. E. Fishman, M. Kupovetsky, V. Kuzelenkov, Scranton - London 2010.
685 files
For the most part, the collection reflects the activities of the JDC European Executive Bureau in Paris during the period 1933-40. The collection includes the JDC charter (1931); accounts of JDC activities (1932-38); minutes of sessions of the presidium of the JDC executive committee in New York (1929-33, and 1938), of the JDC managing committee in New York (1937-38), and the JDC presidium and executive committee (1938); reports by members of its managing committee and board of directors (1938-39); minutes of the meeting of subsections of the European Executive Bureau in Paris (April 1935). Among subjects most discussed are these: the adoption of budget items for the fiscal year in question; Jewish emigration; and support for Jewish social, educational, religious, and commercial organizations. The collection also contains documents of the JDC's representative offices, and of organizations subordinate to the JDC, in Albania, Bulgaria, China, Czechoslovakia, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, India, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Morocco, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Switzerland, Turkey, Yugoslavia, and countries of South America; and also of the United Jewish Appeal. These include lists and addresses of Jewish organizations and philanthropic societies active in these countries; financial statements and statistical reports of the German Jewish Aid Society (Hilfsverein), the Central Committee of German Jews for Relief and Reconstruction, the Reich Representation of Jews in Germany, the Committee to Aid Refugees in France, the Federation of Jewish Communities of France, the Brussels Committee to Aid Emigres, the Jewish Émigré Information Bureau in Basel, and the Geneva Job Placement Bureau for Learned Immigrants; information on the situation of the Jewish population and the activities of Jewish communities in Bombay, Genoa, Trieste, Bologna, Shanghai, Tangier, Zagreb, Durres, Sofia, Bucharest, and other cities, and on the activities of Jewish credit cooperatives and Jewish educational institutions in Eastern and Central Europe; statistical information on the course of emigration and the settlement of Jewish colonies in locations admitting émigrés; information on the activities of the Jewish medical institutions of Warsaw in 1939, on economic aid extended to the Jews of Poland by the JDC, on antiJewish pogroms in Poland in 1936-39, on the founding of the Central Committee of Polish Jews in Warsaw, and on the awarding of individual grants. A set of documents pertaining to the USSR contains information on the financing of Jewish agricultural colonies in the Crimea and the Ukraine, on the work of foreign specialists in Birobidzhan, and on the course of Jewish resettlement in Birobidzhan; an account by Joseph Rosen on the work of AgroJoint, 1924-34; a report by the chairman of the Union of Jews from Germany on the conditions of German Jewish immigration to the USSR; lists of German Jewish immigrant doctors working in the USSR; and copies of letters of the Soviet ambassador in London Ivan Maisky to the League of Nations high commissioner for refugees, Neill Malcolm, on the Soviet government's granting of permission to Jewish emigres from Nazi Germany to enter the USSR. The collection also contains correspondence from the European Executive Bureau in Paris to board members in New York on drawing up reports for international conferences on Jewish emigration from Italy and Germany, on setting up the Council for German Jewry and endowing the committee with an investigative bureau to counter German spies, on raising and allocating funds, on the activities of the HICEM organization, and on planning Jewish emigration to the United States and other countries; with the firm Mavrich-Muzevich on setting up Jewish colonies in Bolivia and Brazil and on conditions for Jewish émigrés' admission to the Dominican Republic; with Jewish community and charitable societies, businesses, and private individuals on aiding the departure and resettlement of, and on providing material assistance to, Jewish émigrés from Europe; with the German Grand Lodge of the Order of B'nai B'rith, the National Coordination Committee, and the Jewish religious community of Vienna on helping Jewish refugees and émigrés obtain American visas; and with the writer Sholem Asch on his trips to Poland in 1933-39 and the publication of his essays on Polish Jewish life in the JTA's Press-Service bulletin. Printed materials deposited in the collection include an illustrated Zurich magazine on the Evian Conference (July 1938); the pamphlet Die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, published by the Union of German Jewish Youth (1935); a directory of Jewish emigration organizations and educational institutions in Germany; newspaper clippings on the economic situation in Palestine and the settlement of Jewish colonies in Chapar (Brazil); issues of the journal Folkshilf (Poland) for 1934-39; and other periodicals from Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland (1934-36).
Американский еврейский объединенный комитет по распределению фондов (Джойнт). Европейское исполнительное бюро