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Descendants Preserve South Jersey’s
Jewish Farming Community
Sasha Rogelberg | Staff Writer
J ewish people are no strangers
to wandering through the wilder-
ness. But the wandering hardly
stopped after those biblical 40 years in
the desert.

In the late 19th century, Jews found
their wilderness in the Pine Barrens
of southern New Jersey and, over the
following decades, against the odds,
farmed the land and made it their home.

From the 1880s to 1960s, Vineland and
the surrounding towns were home to
thousands of European Jewish refugees
and vibrant Jewish life, from synagogues
to kosher butcher shops.

Though now only a scattering of older
Jews call the area home, the South
Jersey farm communities contain riches
of Jewish history.

The stories of the Jewish farming
communities in the Garden State have
been deemed worth preserving and
sharing with the next generation of Jews.

“ALLIANCE,” a documentary by
Susan Donnelly telling the story of
how Russian Jews settled in the
Pine Barrens, premiered at Stockton
University in Galloway on April 16.

“Speaking Yiddish to Chickens:
Holocaust Survivors on South Jersey
Poultry Farms,” detailing the next
generation of European Jews to grow
the farming community, was published
by Rutgers University Press last month.

Donnelly, the great-granddaughter of
one of the original Russian settlers of
the farming community, recognized the
importance of the area’s history after
attending a reunion celebration.

“I started realizing just how many
descendants there are of the colony and
just how committed they are to preserv-
ing their history, learning about it and
how proud they are,” she said. “And it
just seemed like all of these people kind
of deserved and wanted some kind of
acknowledgment of this important piece
of history.”
The “ALLIANCE”
documentary harkens back to the name of the origi-
nal Jewish farming community formed
outside of Vineland in 1882, made up of
43 original families.

In the late 1800s in Russia, Jews were
the victims of rampant antisemitism and
pogroms. The Russian czar prohibited
Jews from owning land, leading them to
flee the country.

The Russian Jewish group Am Olam,
committed to maintaining Russian
Jewish wellbeing through a connec-
tion to the land, joined forces with the
French organization Alliance Israelite
Universelle to settle Jews in the rural
South Jersey Pine Barrens.

True to its name, the land had poor
soil for growing crops, and because the
refugees were not allowed to own land
in their mother country, they had no
farming skills. Together with the other
immigrant groups in the area — Italians,
Germans and Quakers — as well as
Lenape and Black farmers, the Russian
Jews learned to tend to the land, farming
and selling berries, sweet potatoes,
asparagus and grapes.

By the 20th century, however, the
community began to shrink.

“It was very much kind of a social
experiment,” Donnelly said.

“As time went on, as often happens,
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