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Organization for Jewish Colonization in Russia


The Organization for Jewish Colonization in Russia (Idishe Kolonizatsie Organizatsie in Rusland), commonly known by its transliterated acronym of ICOR, was a Communist-sponsored mass organization in North America devoted to supporting the settlement of Jews in new collective settlements, firstly in the newly established Ukrainian Soviet Republic and Southern Russia (Stavropol Krai), and latterly in the Jewish socialist republic of Birobidzhan in the Soviet Union. The organization was founded in the United States in 1924 and soon spread to Canada.

In 1934 the original ICOR organization was supplemented by a new fundraising and solidarity organization, the American Committee for the Settlement of Jews in Birobidjan (Ambidjan). The two groups merged into a unified organization in 1946.

The founding meeting was held in New York City in December 1924 and the initial mission of the organization was to raise money to fund Jewish collective farms in Crimea and to provide a humanitarian alternative for Jews facing anti-Semitism in Europe. ICOR was motivated by the situation of the Jews of Eastern Europe who had faced decades of pogroms and turmoil (including almost a decade of war) in the Pale of Settlement and constant threat of anti-Semitism in their countries of refuge in Central and Western Europe. Alternatively, the relative safety and welcome in the New World yielded what many saw as a trend towards the dissipation of Jewish culture, language, and "nationality". Originally, the committee worked in partnership with its American contributors and Soviet authorities in order to support the newly founded large Jewish collective farms in the formel Pale of Settlement, notably Southern Ukraine and the Crimea. These "kolkhozes" (collective farms) attracted many former shtetl Jews from Ukraine and Belorussia who had previously fled to larger cities for safety, as well as those whose livlihoods had been disrupted in the requisitions and economic restructuring of the early period of Soviet consolidation.

When, in 1928, the Soviet Union abandoned the idea of Jewish settlement in Crimea and endorsed instead the eventual formation of a Jewish Autonomous Republic in the eastern USSR, ICOR followed suit. ICOR worked closely with the Komzet, the Soviet agency facilitating Jewish settlement, and its partner, the OZET.


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