Am Olam

[1][2] It was founded in Odessa in 1881 by Mania Bakl (Maria Bahal) and Moses Herder, who called for the creation of Socialist agricultural communities in the United States.

[9] In the wake of emancipation, Jews in Russia gained rights as citizens, but antisemitism rose when Europe was hit with an economic depression in the 1870s.

Pro-monarch Russians rampaged Jewish settlements, burning homes and food, raping women, and murdering people in attacks called pogroms.

[13] Fleeing from the increasing frequency of Pogroms, many Eastern European Jews migrated to the U.S.[16] As opposed to Jewish immigrants from earlier in the 19th century that had most integrated themselves into American cities, this new wave had their sights set on agricultural life.

Throughout the 1880s, there were 26 colonies in eight states: Louisiana, South Dakota, Kansas, Oregon, New York, Michigan, Colorado, and Arkansas.

[17] Eventually the majority of Am Olam colonies divided land into private property holdings rather than communal ownership.

They settled the first Am Olam colony in Sicily Island, Louisiana which failed a year later when all of their homes and livestock were swept away in a flood.

[19] Many of the families that were part of the colony that failed in Louisiana moved on to South Dakota and founded the first settlement there, called Cremieux.

[18] Cremieux was less economically communal than some other Am Olam settlements: there was private land ownership but some financial sharing of the colony's agricultural corporation.

Harsh environmental conditions, a fourteen-mile distance to the closest railroad, and widespread lack of agricultural experience led to the economic failure of the colony and foreclosure of most homes in Cremieux by 1885.

[18] Inspired by Sholem, an agricultural colony that began in New York in 1837 and lasted for about a decade, many of the Jews that arrived in the 1880s moved further West, in search of empty land.

The New Odessa colony centered socialist ideology, sharing ownership of the land, and attempted to enact gender equality.

In Europe, Russian Jews had been confined to the Pale of Settlement and were allowed limited access to land, forcing most of them to be artisans, craftsmen, or traders, inhibiting their contact with the soil.