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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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Courtesy of Seth Stern
Photo by Max Salier
A family-owned poultry farm in
Vineland, New Jersey, in the
1950s people separated and started doing
things more on their own individually and
farming individually, and the sponsors
that gave the money to the colony to help
them thrive or get through the fi rst fi ve
years really had become interested more
in the type of capitalist way of farming. ...

They didn’t really care about the commu-
nal or social aspect of it,” she continued.

But the community saw a resurgence
in the 1930s when German and Austrian
Congregants of Shairit Haplaite, a shtibl established by Holocaust survivor
poultry farmers in Vineland celebrate the arrival of a new Torah soon after its
founding in the fall of 1957.

Holocaust refugees settled in the area.

Holocaust survivors followed in the years
after, thanks to the Displaced Persons
Act of 1948.

“There were roughly 500 families,
1,000 survivors,” said Seth Stern, author
of “Speaking Yiddish to Chickens” and
editor at Bloomberg Industry Group.

“The largest concentration anywhere in
the U.S. of Holocaust survivor farmers
was in South Jersey.”
The farmers of the 1940s kept chick-
ens, sometimes 3,000 chickens for a
10-acre farm, as a way to compensate for
the land’s poor farming qualities. Kosher
butcher shops abounded, and the area
was even home to a Jewish radio show.

“It was a very tight-knit community.

There was a lot of common history,
shared history,” said Steven Manders,
whose Holocaust survivor parents
owned a chicken farm in the area before
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selling it when Manders was a child.

But as the next generation of Jews
became educated and left Vineland, and
as chicken farming became increasingly
industrial, pushing small farms out of the
market, South Jersey’s Jewish farming
population shrunk once more.

“For the most part,” Stern said, “all
of the Jewish farming was gone by
the early ‘70s.”
Today, though with sparse numbers,
Jews continue to fi nd and build commu-
nity in South Jersey. Alliance Community
Reboot in Pittsgrove Township, founded
by colony member Moses Bayuk’s
great-great-grandson William Levin and
his wife Malya, help preserve Jewish
farming tradition. The Jewish Federation
of Cumberland, Gloucester & Salem
Counties cares for the area’s Holocaust
survivors. Since 2019, Stockton
University’s Alliance Heritage Center has
worked to preserve the area’s history
and curate a digital exhibit.

Thomas Kinsella, the Elizabeth and
Samuel Levin Alliance Heritage Center
director, noted the preciousness of these
stories: “ In one way, this is the American
dream.” ■
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