Ruined By A Flood

Centuries of discrimination against Jews and laws against them owning land in many countries has made the Jewish farmer an anomaly. Jewish farming communities are few and far between.

But in the New World – from the late 1800s through the 1950s – there were many attempts to create Jewish farming settlements as an alternative to the clusters of city tenements many immigrants found themselves in.

With Eastern European Jewry under constant threat of pogroms, and limited immigration options, some rather unusual and often short-lived proposals were made as well.

A publication I recently acquired – titled Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society of the United States: Report on the Formation of the First Russian Jewish Colony in the United States at Catahoula Parish, Louisiana – is a remnant of one such short-lived venture.

In 1882, the Hebrew Foreign Mission Society of New Orleans, working in tandem with the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society, set up an agricultural colony of Russian-Jewish immigrants at Sicily Island in Catahoula Parish. Unfortunately, the project had to be abandoned when the Mississippi River overflowed that very year, flooding the entire area.