and Chinese. The NKVD referred to these decrees collectively as "the National Operations" directed against "nationalities of foreign governments". According to NKVD statistics, from July 1937 to November 1938, 335,513 persons were sentenced by troikas in the course of the implementation of the National Operations. Among them, 247,157 (or 73.6%) were executed by shooting. The American Jewish Joint Agricultural Cooperation and Birobidzhan (JAR) The American Jewish Joint Agricultural Cooperation Agro-Joint, 1924-1938 worked to permanently resettle Jews from shtetls (small Jewish settlements) into new agriculture based settlements across Southern Ukraine and Crimea. Agro-Joint had aided in the resettlement of German-Jewish doctors to help grow the living standards of the communities. Germans were among the top nationalities being repressed and eliminated in Soviet Russia during the thirties while Stalin prepared for war with Hitler. During the Great Purge, 1937–38, there was a directive to rid the Soviet lands of all those with outside (non-Soviet) ties or connections. Members of the Agro-Joint, as well as foreign colonies and national diasporas such as the settlements they established, fell squarely within those parameters. Although the Agro-Joint was never intended as a permanent program, the swiftness and fierceness with which it was dismantled by the Soviet Regime shocked those involved, in particular, its leader Joseph Rosen whose network of internal Soviet connections fell to the purges. In total around 60 high-ranking members of the Agro-Joint staff were arrested, the bulk of which were tried and sentenced by NKVD Troikas on the grounds of being counter-revolutionaries, nationalists, or spies. Happening in conjunction with the resettlements by the Agro-Joint was the Soviet Union's attempt at giving the Jewish population a homeland. This was the Jewish Autonomous Region commonly referred to by its central city Birobidzhan established in 1928, though not officially recognized as an Autonomous Region by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of USSR until May 1934. Though conditions were tough and approximately 2/3rds of the original settlers left upon seeing that things were not as promised, those that remained founded Birofeld, the first Jewish collective farm in 1928. In 1936, barely a year after the official recognition as an Autonomous Region, The Great Terror began and the Jewish Party leadership both in Moscow and Birobidzhan was decimated by arrests and fast trials (by troika), resulting either imprisonment or execution on charges such as "bourgeois nationalism" or being spies for the Germans. Prominent Jewish writer Moyshe