In the wake of World War I, JDC sent tons of kosher meat and clothing to Jews in war-torn Central and Eastern Europe. This shipment sailed to Poland on the SS Ashburn in 1919.
Photo: JDC Archives

Throughout World War I, even after the United States entered the conflict in April 1917, JDC found ways to channel the funds raised by its constituent groups to Jews suffering from hunger and malnutrition, who had lost homes and livelihoods in the belligerent countries of Europe and in Palestine. In addition to financial relief, food and other goods were shipped in as soon as feasible, with 9,000 tons of supplies sent to Palestine on the SS Vulcan in 1915.

Even as the war drew to a close, hundreds of thousands of Jews in Russia, Poland, and other Eastern European countries continued to fall victim to poverty, disease, and famine as pogroms and new outbreaks of hostilities followed in the wake of the Russian Revolution and the liquidation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. JDC steadily broadened its assistance efforts, sending a staff of American experts to work with local Jewish communities to set up relief programs and new health and child care facilities. Existing educational, cultural, and religious institutions were heavily supported, community welfare funds were revived, and credit cooperatives or loan kassas (banks) were established and funded in Poland, Romania, and Lithuania. From the beginning, JDC's overriding goal was to help Jews and Jewish communities achieve self-sufficiency. Thus, by 1924, it was making plans to phase out its direct operations in Europe, confident that the newly strengthened local communities could carry on these activities on their own.

In Palestine, JDC continued to support the fledgling Yishuv, supplying aid to a variety of educational, religious, and social welfare institutions. And it played an integral role in the formation of the Palestine Economic Corporation to further economic development in Palestine in a multitude of ways.

A drastic worsening of economic conditions in Poland in the mid-1920s forced JDC to renew its direct relief activities and shelve its liquidation plans. Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, the American-Jewish Joint Agricultural Corporation (Agro-Joint) was founded in 1924 to promote the establishment — on a large scale — of new Jewish farm settlements, thereby saving Jews from privation and enabling them to recover the citizen rights they were being deprived of as "non-productive" artisans and traders. Nearly 70,000 Jews had been resettled by 1934, when the Soviet government's industrialization program and new granting of citizen rights effectively ended the Agro-Joint experiment. Many settlers soon abandoned the colonies for better opportunities in the urban areas; most of those who remained were killed by the Nazis in 1941-42.