Blessed Eugen Soskin

Blessed Eugen Soskin (between 1900 and 1910)

Selig Eugen Soskin (born March 25, 1873 in Churubasch , Crimea; † March 17, 1959 in Nahariya , Israel ) was a Russian-Jewish agronomist and revisionist-Zionist politician who specialized in intensively farmed agricultural colonization in Palestine and the German- co-founded the Jewish immigrant settlement in Nahariya.

Education and professional career

After graduating from high school in Russia, Soskin went to Germany to study agriculture , first to Berlin, where he belonged to the "Russian-Jewish Scientific Association", whose members also included some other Zionist students such as Chaim Weizmann (1874–1952). Soskin received his doctorate in philosophy in Rostock in 1894 . In 1896 Soskin came to Palestine for the first time after he had been appointed agronomist for Russian settlers in Eretz Israel by the Odessa Committee . Soskin took part in several research trips, including a. on the famous "El Arish Expedition" on the Sinai Peninsula (1903) in order to (in vain) explore Jewish settlement possibilities there. On the VI. At the Zionist Congress (also in 1903) in Basel, Soskin was elected to the “Research Commission for Palestine” and co-editor of the Zionist magazine Alt-Neuland , along with the biologist Otto Warburg (1859–1938) and the social economist Franz Oppenheimer (1864–1943) . Since 1904, Eugen Soskin has regularly published essays and memoranda on intensive small colonization, in which he saw an opportunity to use the narrow Jewish settlement area in Palestine as efficiently as possible. At the (XII. And XIV.) Zionist congresses of the 1920s, Selig Eugen Soskin propagated his colonization model with the support of Weizmann, but against a broad opposition of leading economic experts. After a first experiment failed, the majority rejected it.

Finally, Soskin, together with the settlement planner and private investor Joseph Loewy (1885-1949) and other shareholders, founded a corporation that bought 2000 dunams (200 ha) of land north of Akko from the Arab landowners Toueini, "ameliorated" and parceled out a street -, electrical and water network for future farmers. This place became Nahariya , i.e. H. "Located on the river", called. From 1935 onwards, small private parcels of between half a hectare and a maximum of one hectare were moved into by 150 families from Nazi Germany. They should cultivate fruit and vegetable crops in a self-sufficient circulatory system with their own fertilizer production from small animal husbandry and with the help of a jointly coordinated irrigation system. The model failed partly due to the unfavorable soil and climatic conditions, but also due to a lack of sales and, finally, excessive physical demands on the formerly freelance academic Central Europeans. Through economic reorientation, the inhabitants transformed Nahariya into a tourist and commercial center on the Mediterranean. Soskin himself fell out with the board of directors of the Nahariya Settlement Society and left them in 1941. During and after the Second World War he stayed temporarily in the USA , where he worked out plans for supplying the American soldiers with fresh vegetables and his scientific concept for was allowed to test the development of crops on a minimum area with maximum yield, called "hydroponics". One year before his death, Selig Eugen Soskin was awarded the Israeli State Prize for his scientific work. His remains are in the Nahariya cemetery.

meaning

Selig Eugen Soskin was politically close to the "revisionist" wing of the Zionist movement around Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky (1880-1940), who envisioned a Jewish Palestine on both sides of the Jordan and committed to an offensive implementation of his goals. Soskin distanced himself from the revisionists after they split the Zionist movement in 1935. Politically, Soskin played an important supporting role in connection with the emigration of Czech and Slovak Jews and their settlement in Nahariya in the critical years 1938 and 1939. Despite the failure of his agricultural concept, Blessed Eugen Soskin is still celebrated today as the founder of the Nahariya settlement, which over 1000 Central European refugees of the thirties offered a new existence.

Publications (selection)

• Small settlement and irrigation. The new form of settlement for Palestine. Jüdischer Verlag, Berlin 1920, English edition: Small Holding and Irrigation. The New Form of Settlement in Palestine. Published for the Jewish National Found, London 1920.
• Intense colonization. Essays and speeches on the question of the Jewish settlement in Palestine. Orient-Verlag, Berlin 1922.
• One year of Nahariah. In: The way out. Magazine for redeployment-migration-settlement. Paris-Haifa 1935, p. 36 ff.
• Why Nahariah? An apologetics. Printed by KE Köhler, Eger (CSR) 1935.

literature

• Shmuel Avitzur : An Illusion and Its Destruction. Dr. Blessed Soskin's Theory and Nahariya in Transition (Hebrew). Published by the study group for regional studies . “In the West of Galil”, Nahariya 1978.
• Klaus Kreppel : Paths to Israel. Conversations with German-speaking immigrants in Nahariya . Westfalen-Verlag, Bielefeld 1999, ISBN 3-88918-097-3 .
• Klaus Kreppel: Israel's hard-working Jeckes. Twelve business portraits of German-speaking Jews in Nahariya . Westfalen-Verlag, Bielefeld 2002, ISBN 3-88918-101-5 .
• Klaus Kreppel: Nahariyya - the village of the "Jeckes". The establishment of the middle class settlement for German immigrants in Eretz Israel in 1934/35 . The Open Museum, Tefen 2005, ISBN 965-7301-01-7 .
• Klaus Kreppel: Nahariya's Early Years 1934–1949 The historical introduction and the prefaces to the 15 categories were written by the historian Dr. Klaus Kreppel from Bielefeld . ( rutkin.info ).
• Klaus Kreppel: Nahariyya and the German immigration to Eretz Israel. The history of its inhabitants from 1935 to 1941 . The Open Museum, Tefen 2010, ISBN 978-965-7301-26-5 .
• Klaus Kreppel: Nahariyya Moshewet haYekkim. Sippur Dor HaMeyassdim 1935-1941 . The Open Museum, Tefen 2011, ISBN 978-965-7301-32-6 .
• Klaus Kreppel: The German middle class settlement Nahariyya in Eretz Israel (1934-1941). Problems and conflicts about the “Soskin Plan”. Lecture to the working group on Jewish and Eastern European history and culture. History seminar at the University of Basel on April 22, 2009.
• Amiram Oren: Selig Soskin - his ideas for intensive agricultural settlement and their implementation attempts in the twenties (Hebrew). In: Y. Ben-Arieh, Y. Ben-Artzi, H. Goren (Eds.): Historical-Geographical Studies in the Settlement of Eretz-Israel. Jerusalem 1987, Volume II, pp. 185-205.
• Ines Sonder: Garden Cities for Erez Israel. Zionist urban planning visions from Theodor Herzl to Richard Kauffmann. Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim 2005 (= series Haskala. Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen. Volume 29).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See Richard Lichtheim: Return. Memoirs from the early days of German Zionism. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1970, p. 202.
2. ↑ Article Soskin, Selig Eugen. In: Jewish Lexicon. Founded by Georg Herrlitz and Bruno Kirschner. Jüdischer Verlag, Berlin 1929 ff., Volume IV / 2, Sp. 500.
3. ↑ Stenographic minutes of the negotiations of VI. Zionist Congress in Basel 23, 24, 25, 26, 27 and 28 August 1903. Vienna 1903, p. 328.
4. ↑ Old new land. Monthly for the economic development of Palestine. Organ of the Zionist Commission for the Study of Palestine. Edited by F. Oppenheimer, S. Soskin, O. Warburg. Berlin 1903 ff.
5. ↑ Stenographic minutes of the negotiations of the XII. Zionist Congress in Karlsbad from September 1 to 14, 1921. Berlin 1922. Minutes of the negotiations of the XIV Zionist Congress from August 18 to 31, 1925 in Vienna. London 1926.
6. ^ Palestine Expert Offers Plan to UNRRA for Feeding Liberated Europe by Hydroponics. JTA - Jewish Telegraphic Agency. April 7, 1944. Retrieved April 7, 2014.
7. ↑ 18 Scholars and Scientists Receive Israel's Annual State Prizes. JTA - Jewish Telegraphic Agency. April 28, 1958.