Jewish Colonization Association

Philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch founded the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA or ICA) in 1891 to facilitate mass Jewish emigration from Europe and Russia to rural Argentina, which de Hirsch imagined as a place where Jews would be free from antisemitism. To achieve this, the JCA focused its efforts on supporting Jewish agricultural initiatives and farming education. By 1930, the JCA had purchased over fifty thousand hectares of Argentinean farmland where more than twenty thousand Jewish colonists lived and worked. By that time, the JCA’s interest in Jewish emigration and agriculture had also expanded to support Jewish farming initiatives in Brazil, the United States, Canada, Palestine, Cyprus, and Turkey. It is still active in Israel as the Jewish Charitable Association.