Jewish Agricultural Settlement Corporation

The Jewish Agricultural Settlement Corporation (JASC) was the American branch of the Juedische Landarbeit GmbH, an organization that sought to resettle German-Jewish farmers to Brazil, and to a lesser extent to the Dominican Republic, during the 1930s.

The Juedische Landarbeit GmbH (JLA) was founded 1930 by Martin Gerson as a Halutzim organization for teaching German Jews agricultural skills. In cooperation with the Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden, in the late 1930s the organization sought to resettle German-Jewish farmers, primarily in Paraná, Brazil.

The financial arrangement involved the German-Jewish farmers donating their blocked German currency to the Juedische Landarbeit GmbH, which in turn purchased the land and organized the settlements. Some of the settlers were to own the land, and others to farm the land as tenants. Each settlement was to be based on small groups of 40 people, ideally around ten families of four members each. As of 1940, nearly 170 people had signed up, and capital of 150,000 Reichsmarks had been collected.

In 1939 the Juedische Landarbeit GmbH found it necessary to form a legal entity in the United States, and the Jewish Agricultural Settlement Corporation (JASC) was founded in New York. Its stated purpose was to regulate the relationship between the land owners and tenants, and complete the responsibility of providing the paid-up capital to the settlers. The initial corporation stockholders and administrators in New York were Frederic Borchardt, Franz Wolf, and Fritz Schwarzschild . Hermann Simon quickly took over for Borchardt.

The settlement plan came closest to success in Paraná, Brazil. In 1938, Heinrich Kaphan and Frankfurt attorney Max Hermann Maier moved to Paraná, Brazil, and began making arrangements for the settlers. However, due to difficulties with the Brazilian government, the proposed settlement was never founded. JASC examined other sites in Ecuador and the Dominican Republic, but was unable to found a settlement before the outbreak of war.

It became clear around 1941 that creating a settlement in the near future was unlikely. JASC began returning invested funds, and at the request of its investors also shifted them to other organizations such as the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA, an Argentine settlement organization). However, due to wartime restriction on accounts, full-scale returns were not initiated until 1946. Until its dissolution in 1980, JASC focused on refunding the invested money to the survivors and relatives of those who had invested with the Juedische Landarbeit GmbH . It is not entirely clear from the collection, but it appears that many of the prospective settlers were unable to escape Germany and perished in the Holocaust. In 1947, JASC asked the JDC to take over its accounts, but was not successful. In 1961, the Leo Baeck Institute took over the trust. LBI paid out the last of the claims, and in 1980 JASC was dissolved.

From the guide to the Jewish Agricultural Settlement Corporation Collection, 1930-1982, (Leo Baeck Institute)