“The Kirzhnits’s Plan.” A Project of Jewish Resettlement to Siberia during the Civil War Era
The memorandum “Siberia as a Center for Jewish Immigration” was written in 1919 at the request of F. Rosenblatt, the representative of the Joint Distribution Committee in Siberia. The author of the document, Avrom Kirzhnits, was a well-known journalist, bibliographer, and historian of the labor movement. The memorandum provides a detailed historical survey of projects for the resettlement of Jews to Siberia from the beginning of the 19th century. It also presents a variety of socio-political polemics around the topic of Jewish migration from the Pale of Jewish Settlement to beyond the Urals, including those surrounding the “Brutskus plan” proposed in August 1915. An introductory essay to the document presents the biography of Avrom Kirzhnits and explains the historical context in which the document appeared. The subsequent fate of the “Kirzhnits plan” and its author demonstrate a certain continuity between the idea to create a “center for Jewish immigration” in Siberia and the later Soviet project for the establishment of Jewish autonomy in Birobidzhan.