Kimberley Plan

The Kimberley Plan, or Kimberley Scheme, was a failed plan by the Freeland League to resettle Jewish refugees from Europe in northern Australia before and during the Holocaust.

With rampant anti-Semitism in Europe, the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization was formed in the United States in July 1935, to search for a potential Jewish homeland and haven. The League was a non-Zionist organisation and was led by Isaac Nachman Steinberg. Soon afterwards a pastoral firm in Australia offered the League about 16,500 square kilometres (6,400 sq mi) in the Kimberley region in Australia, stretching from the north of Western Australia into the Northern Territory. The League sent a Yiddish poet and essayist Melech Ravitch to the Northern Territory in the 1930s to investigate the region and to collect data on topography and climate.

The League investigated the proposal, hoping to buy an area of 28,000 square kilometres (11,000 sq mi) of agricultural land for 75,000 Jews fleeing Europe. Under the plan, an initial 500-600 pioneers would arrive to construct basic necessities for the settlement such as homes, irrigation works, and a power station, followed by the arrival of the main body of immigrants. Ravitch in his report to the League promoted a bigger number than Steinberg, suggesting the area could accommodate a million Jewish refugees.

Steinberg (1888–1957) was sent out from London to further investigate the scheme's feasibility and to enlist governmental and communal endorsement. He arrived in Perth on 23 May 1939. Steinberg was a skilled emissary, and based his campaign on the officially declared need by Australia to populate northern Australia. By early 1940, he won the support of churches, leading newspapers, many prominent political and public figures (including Western Australian Premier John Willcock) and a number of Jewish leaders, but he also encountered opposition. Steinberg left Australia in June 1943 to rejoin his family in Canada.

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