Joint (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee)

Founding and Early Work

The Joint was founded on 27 November 1914 in New York City when three existing Jewish relief organizations (the German-Reform American Jewish Relief Committee, the Orthodox Central Relief Committee, and the socialist People's Relief Committee) merged to centralize aid to Jews devastated by World War I. Felix Warburg served as its first chairman.

During World War I, the Joint distributed approximately $16.4 million in aid (equivalent to roughly $236 million today). In 1919–1920, it spent over $22 million on emergency relief for Jews suffering from pogroms in Poland and Ukraine.

Work in the Soviet Union and Agro-Joint

The Joint began work in Soviet Russia under a 1920 agreement with the Bolshevik government. During the 1921–1923 famine, operating within the American Relief Administration (ARA), it fed up to 2 million people daily in Ukraine and Belarus. In 1924 it created Agro-Joint, resettling over 150,000 Jews into more than 250 agricultural colonies in Crimea and Ukraine. The project was terminated in 1938 during Stalin's Great Purge; at least 30 Soviet employees of Agro-Joint were arrested and executed on espionage charges.

The Holocaust Era

After Hitler's rise to power, the Joint supported Jewish emigration from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. Between 1933 and 1939, JDC-supported organizations helped 110,000 Jews leave Germany. During the war, operating from neutral Lisbon, the Joint smuggled aid into occupied territories and channeled $300,000 to the Polish Jewish underground. After the war, it cared for 420,000 Holocaust survivors in displaced persons camps and financed both legal and clandestine emigration to Palestine.

The Doctors' Plot and Expulsion from the Eastern Bloc

With the founding of Israel in 1948 and the intensification of the Cold War, the Joint became a target across the Soviet bloc. It was expelled from Romania and Poland in 1949, Czechoslovakia in 1950, and Hungary in January 1953. At the November 1952 Slánský Trial in Czechoslovakia, the Joint was charged with espionage, sabotage, and smuggling under the guise of charity.

In January 1953, at the height of the Doctors' Plot in the USSR, the TASS news agency named the Joint as a 'Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization created by American intelligence,' allegedly directing the 'doctor-saboteurs' to murder Kremlin leaders. The charges were entirely fabricated, and in April 1953, after Stalin's death, the Soviet government acknowledged the case was a provocation.

Present Day

The Joint returned to the former Soviet Union in 1988 at the invitation of the Soviet government. Today it operates in more than 70 countries, focusing on elderly care, family and child welfare, Jewish community renewal, and international development. It was awarded the Israel Prize in 2007.