The Jewish Colonial Trust

Remarkable finds sometimes turn up in archival repositories. One such artefact was discovered by us in investigative case file No. 169, opened by the Mohyliv-Podilskyi Okrug Department and the 24th Border Detachment of the GPU in 1926. The file dealt with the activities of an underground Zionist organisation to which, according to the investigation, several residents of the Mohyliv-Podilskyi district belonged.

Among those arrested was Israel Solomonovich Shkolnik, a 54-year-old native of Odesa who lived in Mohyliv-Podilskyi and worked as a doctor. During a search of Shkolnik’s home, the vigilant Chekists found nothing compromising — except for several securities. These turned out to be shares in the Jewish Colonial Trust, issued in the name of a certain Malka Gvirtsman from Akkerman.

This unexpected find raises a number of intriguing questions. What exactly was the Jewish Colonial Trust, whose shares had been so carefully preserved in Mohyliv-Podilskyi, far from the centres of finance? What role did this institution play in the complex mosaic of Jewish history in the early twentieth century?

The Jewish Colonial Trust was an important milestone in the history of the Zionist movement and the establishment of the State of Israel. Founded in 1899 on the initiative of Theodor Herzl, this financial institution played a key role in the economic development of the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century.

The creation of the bank was driven by the need to provide financial backing for the Zionist movement’s ambitious plans to establish a Jewish state. Herzl and his associates understood that, in order to realise their plans, they needed a powerful economic instrument capable of accumulating funds from the Jewish diaspora and directing them toward the development of settlements in Palestine.

The bank was registered in London as a joint-stock company, reflecting its founders’ desire to give the institution international standing and to attract investors from different countries. The main areas of activity of the Jewish Colonial Trust included:

✔️ financing agricultural settlements

✔️ supporting industrial enterprises

✔️ investing in infrastructure projects

✔️ providing loans to Jewish immigrants

An important step in the bank’s development was the creation in 1902 of its subsidiary, the Anglo-Palestine Bank, which later became Bank Leumi, one of the largest financial institutions in modern Israel.

The activities of the Jewish Colonial Trust were not limited to purely financial operations. It also performed an important ideological function, symbolising the economic independence and viability of the Jewish national project.

It is quite possible that, by keeping these shares, Israel Shkolnik was not only safeguarding someone else’s property, but also trying to preserve a symbolic link with an idea that, at the time, was considered criminal in the eyes of the Soviet authorities. Fate proved kind to Dr Shkolnik. In the summer of 1926, after a brief period of detention, he was released on a written undertaking not to leave. Soon afterwards, having found insufficient evidence of his guilt, the investigation was forced to close the case.

Shkolnik returned to his medical practice, but the shares in the Jewish Colonial Trust, which had aroused so much suspicion, were never returned to their custodian. They remained silent witnesses to that era, lost in the archives of the Soviet security services. And now, almost a century later, these yellowed sheets have once again seen the light of day, allowing us to come into contact with a remarkable page in the history of Soviet Jewry.

Freddy Rotman