Jewish Agency

Jewish Agency, international body representing the World Zionist Organization, created in 1929 by Chaim Weizmann, with headquarters in Jerusalem. Its purpose is to assist and encourage Jews worldwide to help develop and settle Israel.

Zionists needed financial backing for their project of creating a Jewish national home in Palestine. The Jewish Agency became an external arm of the Zionists, seeking to elicit aid from non-Zionist Jews, overseeing the settlement of Jewish immigrants in Palestine, and helping set up a Jewish economy. It also negotiated with the Palestine mandatory government and Great Britain and represented Jewish interests at the League of Nations. After the anti-Semitic Nazi regime came to power in Germany (1933), the agency was instrumental in increasing the legal quota of immigrants to Palestine; it also set up the Youth Aliyah program to care for and resettle orphaned Jewish children from Nazi Germany.

In May 1942, David Ben-Gurion, representing the Jewish Agency at a Zionist conference at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City, gained support for a program, later termed the Biltmore Resolution, demanding unrestricted Jewish immigration to Palestine, the creation of a Jewish army, and the establishment of Palestine as a Jewish commonwealth. This position drove the non-Zionist members from the agency, which emerged as spokesman for the Jewish cause in the postwar United Nations deliberations that led to the partition of Palestine (Nov. 29, 1947).

Upon the establishment of an Israeli state in 1948, the agency devoted itself primarily to problems of immigration, settlement, the Youth Aliyah, propaganda, and the cultural education of Jews outside Israel. These functions were retained even after 1951, when the Jewish Agency became legally identified with the World Zionist Organization.