The Great Terror in the USSR (1937-1938) and the Destruction of the Agro-Joint Program
|
Lecture
Co-sponsored by The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) Archives Admission: $10 |
One of the lesser-known groups persecuted during Stalin’s Great Purge (1937-38) were the employees of Agro-Joint, an organization created by the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) to resettle and agrarianize Soviet Jews. Prompted by an institutional request in 2005, Misha Mitsel, JDC Senior Archivist, spent the next 8 years searching ex-KGB interrogation files, state archives and memory books to uncover the names of 200 Agro-Joint employees, all accused of "collaboration with a counterrevolutionary organization founded by the director of Agro-Joint, Dr. Rosen."
About the Speaker
Mikhail “Misha” Mitsel is a historian and archivist specializing in European Jewish History. Mitsel has served as the Senior Archivist at the Archives of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in New York since 1999. Prior to his position at JDC, Mitsel was a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Jewish Studies in Kiev from 1993-1998, where he led a project on “Jewish Religious Communities in the Ukraine after WWII.” He is the author of many articles and books in English, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian, including his most recent book, “The Final Chapter”: Agro-Joint in the Years of the Great Terror, which was published in Russian (with one chapter in English) by Dukh i Litera in 2012.
