There was a brief burst of successful Palestinophile activity in the mid-1880s following the pogroms of 1881-82 and the establishment of the Hib-bat Zion movement. Max Mandel’shtam and the Hebrew poet Yehalel were the driving force behind the branch and were indeed leaders of the movement on the national level; Mandel’shtam, together with Pinsker, Lilienblum, and others, worked to forge a confederation out of individual Hibbat Zion groups.46 As with almost every aspect of organized Jewish life in Kiev, successful activity depended on the support of the notables, and the Kiev Palestinophiles consistently tried to win over the city's Jewish elite. Some Jewish plutocrats donated money to support emigration in the immediate wake of the pogroms, but ceased contributing when they regained confidence in the Russian government and its actions to stop anti-Jewish violence. A celebration in 1884 of the one hundredth birthday of Moses Montefiore, patron of Jewish settlement in Palestine and advocate for Jewry the world over, was made simultaneously into an occasion to honor Israel Brodsky. Funds raised at the festivities were to be earmarked for Jewish settlers in Palestine. Israel Darewski, describing the event, added that although Brodsky and his son Lazar had not yet actually donated to the cause, it was hoped that they would contribute a large sum (!).47 Hebrew writer Y. Y. Vaysberg also voiced the hope that Kiev's notables would hearken to the call to assist in settling the Land of Israel, just as many middle-class Kiev Jews were doing.48 Some apparently did: internal memoranda within the Kiev provincial administration reveal knowledge of an 1885 meeting of both rich and poor Jews at the home of merchant Moisei Vainshtein, a leader of the city's Jewish community, where 8,000 rubles were raised for the Love of Zion movement.49 Vainshtein's home was in Ploskaia, which indicates that he was a businessman of a somewhat lesser order than Brodsky, Margolin, and the other grandees; this, however, did not hinder him from raising over double the sum raised at the meeting in 1884.
An apocryphal story was told about an encounter between the plutocrat Lazar’ Brodsky and the Zionist leader Mandel’shtam, in Brodsky's office. When Mandel’shtam returned from the First Zionist Congress in 1897, he presented a report on the proceedings in a private meeting with some of the plutocrats. Brodsky asked him, "If you like this plan so much, why don't you go to Palestine yourself?" Mandel’shtam responded, "You are now building all these hospitals in Kiev—why don't you be one of the first patients in them?"50 Whether or not the story is actually true, it does provide insight into the perspectives of Kiev's two most prominent Jewish leaders, each of whom took a very different approach to Jewish communal affairs. While both men lived comfortable lives in Kiev and devoted considerable energy to bettering the lot of the Jewish masses, Mandel’shtam saw no future for Jews in Russia—in an 1887 letter to a colleague in Berlin, he described himself as "without homeland; a mixture of Jew, Russian, and German"—and thus poured all his energy into Zionism (and later Territorialism), while Brodsky was a classic liberal who believed that the tsarist government would eventually grant equal rights to Russian Jews.51
In 1894, Eliezer Friedmann, lamenting in Ha-melits that Jews no longer seemed to care about Hibbat Zion, took up the cudgel: the notables and great Jewish patrons of the city were especially to blame for the decline, apparently because they had withheld essential financial support.52 He would later recall that during his first years in Kiev, from 1893 to 1899, there had been almost no substantive Palestinophile activity in the city.53 This may have been an exaggeration, because other sources tell of meetings at the progressive prayer quorum (the forerunner of the Choral Synagogue), a two-hundred-strong volunteer or member corps, and collections of hundreds of rubles.54 Moshe Rozenblat also recalled semi-clandestine Zionist meetings at Brodsky's synagogue as well as at the Rozenberg (Tailors') Synagogue in Podol and, for the intelligenty-professionals (doctors, lawyers, engineers, and the like), in private homes.55 Sholem Aleichem was also very active as a Palestinophile propagandist in the late 1890s; among his works was "Der yudisher kongres in Bazel," a Yiddish version of a speech about the 1897 Zionist Congress that Mandel’shtam had given in a number of Kiev prayer houses.56 Friedmann wrote that both Brodsky and Zaitsev were opposed to Hibbat Zion, and an anonymous article in Ha-melits in 1896 confirms that the movement had only had limited success in winning over the notables, in Kiev as elsewhere in the empire. Exulting that Baron Gintsburg and Jacob Poliakov, leading figures in Russian Jewry, were now members, the writer continued on a more somber note: "we can hope that the rest of the Jewish notables [atsilei yisra’el ], in Kiev and in the other cities, will not stand against the society forever."57 However, a published list of investors in the Jewish Colonial Bank in 1899 reveals that Zaitsev had bought five hundred shares, more than anyone else in Kiev, so perhaps his initial hostility turned into acceptance.58 Overall, it seems clear that general interest in the cause was declining in the 1890s, as another Kiev observer wrote and as was the case throughout the empire.59 Police harassment may have been another factor; archival documents reveal that Mandel’shtam, chair of the Kiev branch, denied any knowledge of a Hibbat Zion organization in Kiev when questioned by the chief of police in 1885.60 Mandel’shtam himself wrote to a colleague in Vienna that official restrictions were hampering the growth of the movement, but added that the character of the Jews in southern Russia was also a problem, especially those of better means, who demanded immediate, concrete results. He also intimated that the Jews of the south were somewhat less energetic than those of Lithuania, where "countless societies" had already been organized.61
In a speech on the Zionist Congress in London in 1900, Mandel’shtam upbraided his fellow Zionists in Kiev, just as he had criticized the Zionist movement in general at the congress: "[As elsewhere,] we in Kiev have not done one-tenth of that which we could have done. Other than ten or twelve energetic individuals. . . everyone else slept, awakening only we shook them forcefully. Let every Zionist fulfil his duty. . . !"62 At home in Kiev, from the turn of the century on, Mandel’shtam, together with Hillel Zlatopol’skii, a successful businessman who was also a donor to Jewish causes and a Hebraist, were kept busy as the heads of Russian Zionism's "financial center" (merkaz ha-kesafim), based in Kiev.63 Students were also active in the Zionist movement; as he later recalled in his memoirs, Nokhem Shtif, a student at the Polytechnical Institute, belonged to "the general Zionist organization" before seceding with other students and founding "a leftist radical group."64
World History
