with, among others, former members of the YS, SS, Fareynikte, and ITO taking the lead (including Ben-Adir). Recognizing the threat of Hitler’s rise to power, they formed the Lige far Yidisher Kolonizatsye (League for Jewish Colonization). The Frayland movement soon blossomed with organizations being founded in other cities as well, including Vilna and Warsaw (the two largest branches), Łódź, Częstochowa, and Białystok in Poland, as well as London and New York.

In Poland, the Frayland-lige experienced a setback when heightened antisemitism in 1935 after Józef Piłsudski’s death—including calls on the part of Poles for wholesale Jewish emigration, if not voluntary, then forced—led the Bund, supported by the Communists, to launch a campaign to insist that Jews hold their ground and fight. Even though the Frayland-lige had refused to negotiatewith any country that wanted to rid itself of Jews and would only do so with countries that welcomed them, the opponents of the antisemitic Polish campaign saw territorialism as a tacit acceptance of the terms of the oppressor.

Nonetheless, the popularity and visibility of the Frayland-lige grew when its negotiations led in 1937 to France’s minister of colonies, Marius Moutet, expressing his support for potential mass Jewish colonization in Madagascar, New Caledonia, New Hebrides, or French Guiana. The organization’s activity in Poland intensified after the German Anschluss (annexation) of Austria (March 1938) and Kristallnacht (November 1938). Few records of the Polish Frayland-lige survive, but the extant membership figures of the Vilna territorialist youth group, Shparber, numbering almost 200 in 1939 (second only to that city’s Bund youth group),