NEWS I
Filmmaker Is Telling
Jewish Farmer Story
BEN GALLOB
Special to The Jewish News
unique chapter in
Jewish history — the
emergence of im-
migrant Jews as major con-
tributors to New Jersey's
farm output — is almost at an
end, largely unknown to
American Jews.
Even less known is the fact
that New Jersey experience
I - was duplicated throughout
the United States, and in
Canada and South America.
Over nearly a century, the
Baron de Hirsch Fund and
the Jewish Agricultural
Society helped Jews in both
► North and South America to
get started at farming, accor-
ding - to a professor who is
devoting her life to chronicl-
ing and disseminating the
history and achievements of
New Jersey's Jewish farmers.
In 1980, Professor Gertrude
Dubrovsky, who grew up on a
Jewish farm, established a
non-profit agency, Documen-
tary III, in Princeton. It is
chartered to discover, record
and share the community
histories of New Jersey
Jewish farmers.
At the peak of that ex-
perience, Dubrovsky said,
there were Jewish farmers in
every one of the state's 22
counties. At one time there
were Jewish farmers in every
▪ state.
After living and working on
a Jewish poultry farm in Far-
mingdale, Dubrovsky left her
parents' farm to marry a son
of a Jewish farmer in 1946.
The newly married couple
I" bought a poultry farm near
the farms of their parents.
They operated their farm for
15 years until it became pain-
fully clear, as it did eventual-
ly for virtually all Jewish
farmers, that it had become
impossible to earn even a
meager livelihood from a
small farm. After the farm
and her marriage failed,
Dubrovsky earned aliving as
a public school teacher.
She earned a bachelor's
degree at a Georgian Court
College in Lakewood, N.J., a
master's degree in English at
Rutgers University in 1959
and finally a doctorate in
languages and literature at
Columbia University in 1974.
Her doctoral dissertation
was in Yiddish, a language
used by virtually all the
Jewish farmers. Research for
her doctorate took her into
the rural experience of Jews
and impressed on her the
urgency of the need to
preserve
the
rapidly
vanishing culture of New
Jersey's Jewish farmers. That
determination led her to
create Documentary III.
A major project of
Documentary III is a one-
hour documentary film, This
Land is Theirs, planned for
public television, schools and
similar institutions.
"We have 15 hours of film-
ed interviews," Dubrovsky
said, adding that much re-
mains to be done before the
film is ready for broadcast
next year.
, In the process, she has
assembled a huge collection
of archival materials. These
include photographs, taped
interviews and some
videotaping of the ongoing ac-
tivities of the cultural and
social organizations of the
once-active Jewish farmers.
She spent two years,
1975-77, interviewing more
than 120 Jewish former
farmers. She learned that the
first successful and long-
lasting New Jersey Jewish
farm industry was created in
the southern New Jersey
town of Vineland in 1882.
Dubrovsky said this unique
chapter in Jewish history
began when turn-of-the-
century Jewish immigrants,
unhappy at the thought of
toiling all their lives as pants
pressers, tailors, and
shoemakers in their new
homeland, moved from New
York to New Jersey to start
poultry farms.
For $5,000, obtainable from
the Jewish Agriculture Socie-
ty, a Jewish family could buy
a five-acre farm, with a house
and a chicken coop in which
2,000 chickens could be
raised.
It was a unique culture —
farming intertwined with
Jewish values — and it has
largely disappeared. Those
values excluded religion,
which as robust socialists
they scorned.
Asked how many Jewish
farmers were active at the
peak of the Jersey experience,
Dubrovsky said, "No one has
really accurate figures." She
added that, as the Documen-
tary III brochure put it, "with
every day that passes, a little
more of our cultural heritage
disappears."
Development of the film has
so far been financed by grants
from the New Jersey
Historical Commission, the
de Hirsch Fund, a bank and
private individuals. ❑
(c) 1989 Jewish Telegraphic
Agency
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THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
53