Katowice Conference

Important early members were: Chaim Weizmann, Ahad Ha’am, Menachem Ussishkin, Israel Zangwill, and Leo Motzkin.

In 1882, Leon (Yehuda Leib) Pinsker, influenced by a string of pogroms in his town of Odessa, anonymously published “Auto-Emanzipation.

Waves of pogroms in the Russian Empire from 1881-1884 and the anti-Semitic May Laws of 1882 introduced by Tsar Alexander III of Russia, deeply affected Jewish communities and prompted the Hovevei Zion movement to take action and organize the conference.

The growing separation of Jewish communities due to sudden freedom and assimilation also was a cause for action, as many feared that Judaism's ancient sense of unified nationality would disappear.

In the end Leon Pinsker, Moses Leib Lilienblum, Hermann Schapira, Max Emmanuel Mandelstamm, and others took the initiative to convene a conference.

Schapira, who could not attend, sent a telegram to point out the importance of establishing financial institutions, including a general Jewish fund, whose primary task would be to redeem land in Eretz Israel.

At the proposal of Pinsker the conference established an institution named Agudat Montefiore to promote farming among the Jews and support Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel.