September 22: Arresting Zionists in the USSR

Several thousand Zionists were arrested by the Soviet secret police on this and several other nights in 1924 as the newly empowered Joseph Stalin sought to crack down on all political parties and tendencies other than the communists. Those arrested were exiled to remote areas, including Siberia (although some were permitted to leave for Palestine, instead, as part of the Fourth Aliyah, which brought some 80,000 Jews to Palestine between 1924 and 1928). Zionists had been subject to repression since the start of the Bolshevik Revolution, often with Jews of the Evsektsia, the Jewish Section of the Communist Party, leading the attack. Further arrests took place in 1926 in Moscow, Leningrad, Simferopol, and elsewhere, while new Zionist agricultural settlements in the Crimea (a southern peninsula that was home to some 20,000 Jews) were shut down. Only Zionist youth organizations, notably the He-Halutz (Pioneer), were permitted to operate for a few more years, since exile and imprisonment were not permitted by Soviet law for minors. Simultaneously, the Soviet government was campaigning actively against anti-Semitism and empowering Yiddish cultural activists to create a renaissance of Jewish art and culture.
“Crimean Jews suffered greatly from the Russian Civil War . . . which reduced the Jewish population from 60,000 to 30,000. Nonetheless, the peninsula became a center of Zionist activity . . . as pogroms in Ukraine brought refugees who were searching for routes to Palestine or elsewhere. . . . Starting in 1924, a foreign-funded agricultural settlement movement of Jews from the former Pale brought significant population growth and a shift in residence patterns. According to the 1939 Soviet census, 65,452 Jews lived in Crimea (5.8% of the population) . . .” —YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe