In 1917, the Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar of Russia and seized power. It was the dawn of the Communist era.

A year later, the Kehilla – a communal organizational structure that had served European Jewish communities for more than 700 years – was banned. Synagogues and Jewish religious schools were closed. Hebrew was outlawed. Those who tried to practice their religion were mercilessly persecuted. For the next 70 years, any expression of Jewish religion or culture was brutally repressed.

In 1918, JDC launched what would become a massive relief and reconstruction effort in Russia. Hundreds of thousands of Jews – primarily in Belarus and Ukraine – became targets of violent anti-Semitism during the three-year civil war between the Bolsheviks and those who supported the Czar. Widespread pogroms broke out. In Ukraine alone, 75,000 Jews were murdered, and thousands of Jewish refugees were homeless. JDC raised $33.4 million, opened dozens of soup kitchens and sent convoys of food-laden trucks to feed 600,000 starving Jews throughout the region.

In 1920, two JDC officials – Israel Friedlander and Bernard Cantor – were killed by Soviets as they attempted to reach Jews in Kiev. The tragedy eventually led the Soviets to allow JDC to operate officially in the Soviet Union and to launch an agricultural resettlement program for Jews, known as AgroJoint, in 1924.

JDC was allowed to continue its humanitarian aid in the Soviet Union until 1938.

On June 22, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Three months later, 34,000 Jews were exterminated at Babi Yar outside Kiev. By the end of World War II, an estimated 1.1 million Soviet Jews perished in the Holocaust.

In the ensuing decades, Soviet leaders periodically cracked down on the Jewish population. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Stalin arrested hundreds of the Jewish intelligentsia.

One of the most famous cases was called the "Doctor’s Plot." Jewish physicians were accused of using "medical sabotage" to shorten the lives of Soviet leaders. A story in the Soviet newspaper Pravda that appeared on January 13, 1953, claimed:

The majority of the participants of the terrorist group…were bought by American intelligence. They were recruited by a branch-office of American intelligence – the international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization called "Joint" [JDC]. The filthy face of this Zionist spy organization, covering up their vicious actions under the mask of kindness, is now completely revealed.

Following the Six Day War in June 1967, the government launched yet another virulent anti-Zionist campaign that targeted all Jews.

In the 1960s, a small, but influential, group of Jewish intellectuals began agitating for human rights and the right to emigrate. Using third parties, JDC quietly offered what aid it could. The struggle of these refuseniks continued into the 1980s. They sowed the seeds of a Jewish revival that began in the late 1980s.

JDC officially returned to the Soviet Union in 1988. Since then, we have provided the guidance and funding to help Jewish communal life blossom into today's Jewish renaissance.

2005