Many Russian-Jewish intellectuals dreamed of establishing Jewish agricultural and farming colonies in the United States, where some batches of emigrants who had left during the year 1881 had already managed to settle on the land.  A part of the Jewish youth was carried away by the idea of settling in Palestine, and conducted a vigorous propaganda on behalf of this national idea among the refugees from the modern Egypt.  There was urgent need of uniting these emigration societies scattered all over the Pale of Settlement and of establishing central emigration committees to regulate the movement which had gripped the people with elemental force.

Unfortunately, there was no unity of purpose among the Jewish leaders in Russia.  The intellectuals who stood nearer to the people, such as the well-known oculist, Professor Mandelstamm, who enjoyed great popularity in Kiev, and others like him, as well as a section of the Jewish press, particularly the Bazsvyet, insisted continually on the necessity of organizing the emigration movement, which they regarded as the most important task confronting Russian Jewry at that time.  The Jewish oligarchy in St. Petersburg, on the other hand, was afraid lest such an undertaking might expose it to the charge of “disloyalty” and of a lack of Russian patriotism.  Others again, whose sentiments were voiced by the Russian-Jewish periodical Voskhod and who were of a more radical turn of mind, looked upon the attempt to encourage a wholesale emigration of Jews as a concession to the Government of Ignatyev and as an indirect abandonment of the struggle for emancipation in Russia itself.

In the spring of 1882, the question of organizing the emigration movement had become so pressing that it was decided to convene a conference of provincial Jewish leaders in St. Petersburg to consider the problem.  Before the delegates had time to arrive in the capital, the sky of South Russia was once more lit up by a terrible flare.  Balta, a large Jewish center in Podolia, where a Jewish emigration society had had sprung into being shortly before the catastrophe, became the scene of a frightful pogrom.

It was shortly before the Russian Passover, the high season of pogroms, when the Russian public was startled by a strange announcement published towards the end of March in the Imperial Messenger to the effect that from now on it would accurately report all cases of “Jewish disorders” in accordance with the official information received from the governors.  The announcement clearly implied that the Government knew beforehand of the imminence of new pogroms.  Even the conservative Moscow News commented on the injudicious statement of the official organ in emphatic and sarcastic terms: