ICOR

ICOR. Founded in 1924 in New York, the Association for Jewish Colonization in the Soviet Union, or Gezelshaft far Yidishe Kolonizatsye in Rutn-Farband—known by the transliterated acronym ICOR—was active for a quarter-century among Yiddish-speaking working-class Jews. Along with a sister movement, the American Committee for the Settlement of Jews in Birobidjan (Ambijan), founded in 1935, its main aim was to provide support for the establishment of a Jewish socialist republic in Birobidzhan in the Soviet far east. The ICOR’s politics also revolved around the defense of the Soviet Union, which, it maintained, was eliminating anti-Semitism; the struggle against fascism (especially, after 1933, Nazi Germany); and opposition to Zionism, an ideology deemed inimical to the Jewish working class.

Closely tied to the Communist Party, USA, by the mid-1930s the ICOR claimed a membership of eleven thousand, spread out over 165 branches in twenty-five states and four Canadian provinces. Included were eleven women’s branches and thirteen exclusively for youth, as well as occupationally-based groups, such as the Amalgamated ICOR, for tailors in the garment industry. New York State, with thirty branches, led the list; the Workers Cooperative Colony in the Bronx had its own special section, alone numbering 228 people. California and Illinois each had seventeen branches, and Los Angeles had the second-largest overall number of members after New York City. Large ICOR branches could be found in Baltimore, Boston, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Newark, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia.

Charles Kuntz, the president, was a non-Communist; Sol Almazov and Abe Epstein, both members of the Communist Party, were secretary and national organizer, respectively. The national executive included the Communists J. M. Budish, Melech Epstein, Louis Hyman, Kalmen Marmor, Gina Medem, Paul Novick, Joseph Sultan, and Leon Talmy. Almazov edited the bilingual English-Yiddish monthly ICOR, later renamed Nailebn—New Life, which occasionally attained a circulation of fifty thousand. The ICOR also published numerous books and pamphlets.

In 1929, the ICOR sent a commission of experts to Birobidzhan to study its economic potential, and it later furnished financial assistance and even some colonists to the region. In the United States, it sponsored reading tours, lectures, banquets, and mass rallies, such as those held all over the country in 1937 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The anti-Communist climate after World War II proved destructive to the ICOR and Ambijan. The remaining fifteen hundred members of the two groups merged and held their final national conference in New York in 1949, their last honorary president none other than Albert Einstein; they ceased operations in 1950.

Srebrnik, Henry. Dreams of Nationhood: American Jewish Communists and the Soviet Birobidzhan Project, 1924-1951. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010.

Srebrnik, Henry. Jerusalem on the Amur: Birobidzhan and the Canadian Jewish Communist Movement, 1924-1951. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008.

Srebrnik, Henry. “Territorialism and the ICOR ‘American Commission of Scientists and Experts’ to the Soviet Far East,” in Hasia Diner and Gennady Estraikh, eds. 1929: Mapping the Jewish World. New York: New York University Press, 2013: 107-122.

Srebrnik, Henry. “American Rabbis, Pastors and Left Jewish Activists in Support of the Birobidzhan Project in the 1930s,” in Ber Boris Kotlerman, ed. Mizrekh: Jewish Studies in the Far East Vol. 2: Religion – Philosophy – Identification. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Publishers, 2011: 69-95.

Srebrnik, Henry. “‘An Enemy of the Jewish Masses’: The ICOR and the Campaign Against Zionism, 1924-1935,” in August Grabski, ed. Rebels Against Zion: Studies on the Jewish Left Anti-Zionism. Warsaw: Jewish Historical Institute, 2011: 89-109.