Joint Distribution Committee
(JDC)
Founded
in 1914 to assist Palestinian Jews caught
in the throes of World War I, JDC has aided
millions of Jews in more than 85 countries.
The Early Years
In the fall of 1914,
Henry Morgenthau, then United States Ambassador
to Turkey, cabled Louis Marshall and Jacob
H. Schiff in New York requesting $50,000
to save the Palestinian Jews (then under
Turkish rule) from starvation. By
November, the funds were raised, and JDC
was formed to distribute them to needy
Jews in Palestine and in war-torn Europe.
World War I ended in
1918, but the suffering of European Jews
continued. The aftermath of the Russian
Revolution and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire brought new outbreaks of anti-Semitic hostility in Russia and Poland. Hundreds
of thousands of Jews perished in pogroms
and from disease and famine. Those
who survived found their homes destroyed
and their economic and social institutions
in ruins.
JDC helped local Jewish
communities establish relief programs and
new health and child care facilities in
Poland and Russia. We also supported
religious, cultural and educational institutions. In
1921, JDC began working through local agencies
to make Jewish communities self-supporting.
We helped establish more than 300 locally
operated Eastern European cooperative credit
unions to assist Jewish-owned businesses.
Meanwhile, Agro-Joint – working
with the Soviet government as it resettled
some 600,000 Jews in the Ukraine and the
Crimea – trained them to work as
farmers. Agro-Joint was expelled
from the USSR in 1938.
World War II
As Hitler consolidated
power between 1933 and 1939, JDC accelerated
its aid to German Jewry. JDC helped 250,000
Jews flee Germany and 125,000 to leave
Austria. As German armies approached Paris
in 1940, JDC transferred its offices to
Lisbon. From there, we helped thousands
escape from Europe. JDC maintained
thousands more in hiding throughout the
war. JDC aid reached Jewish prisoners
in labor battalions in France. Some 250,000
packages from Teheran sustained Polish
and Ukrainian Jews in Asiatic Russia. Supplies
were parachuted to Yugoslavia, and funds
were smuggled to the Polish Jewish underground.
JDC supported refugee
resettlement efforts in Latin America and
organized a relief program in Shanghai
for more than 20,000 refugees. After
Pearl Harbor, JDC channeled aid to Jews
in occupied Europe and Shanghai through
connections its Swiss office had established
with neutral embassies and the International
Red Cross.
Post-War Efforts
Late in 1944, JDC entered
Europe’s liberated areas and organized
a massive relief effort. By the end of
1947, some 700,000 Jews received aid from
JDC. More than 250,000 of them lived
in Displaced
Persons (DP) camps operated
by JDC. JDC’s retraining programs
helped people in DP camps learn trades
that would enable them to earn a living,
while its cultural and religious activities
helped re-establish Jewish life.
JDC funding helped Jewish
refugees leave Europe. We opened
an office in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to
assist Holocaust survivors immigrating
to South
America. Our contributions enabled
115,000 refugees to reach Palestine before
1948.
In May 1948, Israel proclaimed
its independence. JDC, in cooperation with
the Jewish
Agency, helped some 440,000
Jews to reach Israel from Europe, North
Africa and the Middle East. Many
of these new immigrants were too old or
infirm to build new lives. JDC established
JDC/MALBEN for their care and also
provided services to the physically and
mentally disabled in Israel.
JDC organized welfare
programs for Jews in North Africa and the
Middle East in 1949 and later assisted
in the evacuation of Jews
from Iraq and Yemen. We continue to fund health,
welfare and educational programs for those
who remained, a population that has dwindled
over the years.
In Western Europe, JDC
helped local organizations assist the devastated
communities restore Jewish life, train
new leadership and revive communal institutions.
With onset of the Cold War, JDC was expelled
from most countries of Eastern Europe but
was able to provide indirect assistance
to Jews behind the Iron Curtain.
1960-1979
Few could predict the
changes that the 1960s and 1970s would
bring. In 1962, JDC began working
in India, assisting the Jewish poor and
working to strengthen Jewish life. In 1967,
JDC was invited back to Romania, primarily
to help the community provide for its needy
elderly and to sustain Jewish religious
life.
In Israel, JDC began
its evolution from a direct service operator
of programs for disadvantaged new immigrants
to a catalyst for societal change.
In 1969, JDC, in partnership
with the government, established ESHEL,
the Association for Planning & Developing
Services for the Aged. ESHEL has
helped develop comprehensive services for
the aged that serve as models for communities
around the Jewish world. JDC was
also instrumental in establishing a network
of American-model community centers that
have helped integrate all sectors of Israeli
society.
In 1975, we established
the JDC-Brookdale Institute. Today,
it is the world’s leading Jewish
center for applied research on aging, health
policy, disability, and children and youth.
The mid-1970s brought
the loosening of barriers to Soviet
Jewish emigration. While thousands of Soviet
Jews emigrated to Israel, others disembarked
during stopovers in Italy hoping to start
new lives in the West. They were housed
in Ladispoli, outside Rome, until they
could obtain visas to Western countries.
For more than a decade, JDC provided these
transmigrants with relief and welfare services,
and religious and cultural programming.
1980-1999
In 1983, the Ethiopian
government granted JDC permission to establish
a nonsectarian program in the Gondar region,
where most Ethiopian Jews lived. Later,
in the early 1990s, JDC provided aid to
tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews as
they awaited aliyah. We also
were key players in “Operation
Solomon,” the massive airlift of 15,000 Ethiopian
Jews to Israel in May 1991.
JDC launched the International
Development Program in 1986. Over the years,
this nonsectarian program has provided
development aid and disaster relief in
Europe, Asia, Africa, the former Soviet
Union and Latin America.
During the 1980s, JDC
was able to return to many countries in
Eastern Europe. Since then, we have
helped local communities develop welfare
services for their needy elderly and community
centers that offer a range of cultural
and religious programs for Jews of all
ages.
JDC returned to the Soviet
Union in 1988. We immediately initiated
programs of cultural and religious renewal,
and, within a year, we were providing welfare
relief to thousands of destitute elderly
Jews. JDC also launched a program
to train local Jewish activists and helped
them develop communal organizations that
would orchestrate welfare and Jewish renewal
programs. Today, JDC-supported welfare
programs reach 250,000 needy elderly in
more than 2,600 cities and towns, and Jews
of all ages participate in cultural and
educational programs, holiday celebrations
and other communal activities.
In 1991, the Cuban government
lifted restrictions on religious practice. Since
then, JDC has been providing badly needed
food and medical supplies and has fostered
the revival of religious and communal life
for Cuba’s 1,500 Jews.
2000- Present
In Israel today, JDC’s
top priority is responding to the Matsav that
threatens Israel’s existence. As
we develop and launch emergency assistance
programs such as "Keep Our Children Safe," we
continue to provide strategic intervention
that focuses on protection of children
and teens; care for the elderly; aid for
vulnerable immigrant populations; research
and development of social services; promoting
philanthropy and volunteerism and project
management for donors.
We also are responding
aggressively to the economic crisis in
Argentina that has left more than 40,000
Argentine Jews destitute and in urgent
need of direct welfare assistance. Using
a multileveled approach, JDC is supervising
and coordinating allocations of food, shelter,
medications and clothing to the most needy
Jews through Social Assistance Centers
and the Volunteer Network; providing relief
and welfare to the elderly; establishing
programs for small business development
and job opportunities, and working to increase
the fund-raising capacity of the local
community.
And, of course, we are
continuing our work in the former Soviet
Union and in all those countries where
Jewish communities need our support.
Wherever and whenever
Jews are in need, JDC will be there to
offer them help and hope, for we are "One
people, one heart…" (Rashi, Exodus
19:2).
Source: Israeli
Foreign Ministry; JDC |