When the American agronomist and communal activist Joseph A. Rosen suggested providing financial support through the Joint Distribution Committee to resettle Jewish victims of the pogroms in the region, the Kremlin jumped at the opportunity.
In 1923, the Politburo accepted a proposal for establishing a Jewish Autonomous Region in the Crimea, before reversing itself a few months later.
Nevertheless, from 1924 until 1938, the Joint Distribution Committee, through its subsidiary American Jewish Joint Agricultural Corporation and with the financial support of American Jewish philanthropists like Julius Rosenwald, supported Jewish agricultural settlements in Soviet Crimea. Numerous Jewish collective farms and even whole Jewish districts sprouted over the next few years.
The dream of building a Jewish republic in the Crimea remained alive until the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
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It was in the context of this chaos that Mikhoels and Fefer met with the Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and discussed the idea of establishing a Jewish homeland in the Crimea.
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Yet Molotov was not unfriendly toward Jews; his wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, was from a Jewish family in southern Ukraine and had a sister who had emigrated to Palestine. Mikhoels and Fefer left the meeting convinced that Molotov would support the plan and followed through by sending a memorandum outlining the proposal to Stalin.
But instead, Stalin used the Crimean proposal as a pretext for a major assault on Soviet Jewry. The United Nations vote in support of the establishment of the State of Israel in November 1947 had rendered a Jewish homeland in the Crimea superfluous and reinforced Stalin’s suspicions of Jewish national aspirations. On the night of Jan. 12, 1948, Stalin had Mikhoels murdered, signifying the beginning of Stalin’s campaign against the Jews. Over the next 13 months, Fefer, Zhemchuzhina, and numerous other members of the Jewish Antifascist Committee were arrested. Zhemchuzhina was exiled to Kazakhstan. Fifteen others were tried in secret
on the charge of conspiring with the United States to establish a Jewish republic in the Crimea.