The most successful Jewish agricultural community in America thrived for more than 100 years in Salem County, NJ

In the early 1880s, Russian Jews living under Czar Alexander III suffered a brutal series of pogroms. With some help from Jews in Western Europe, many of them emigrated to the United States, as anyone who has watched Fiddler on the Roof will know.

Inspired by a movement formed in Russia called the Am Olam (meaning “eternal people”) and aided by philanthropists, the Russian Jews arrived in America wanting to start farming colonies, more than 20 of which were founded in the US. Nearly all of them failed.

The most successful of those, and also the longest-lasting, was the Alliance Colony, established in 1882 by 40 or so families, in Salem County, NJ, in what is now Pittsgrove Township. The new arrivals, in May of that year, walked from a train station to the 150-acre plot of land that would become the Alliance Colony.

The farmers grew sweet potatoes, peaches, and strawberries, and the produce ended up in the New York and Philadelphia markets. With little money, no English skills, and no experience or knowledge of farming, the farmers struggled to establish the colony in its early years.

But by the turn of the 20th century, Alliance began to prosper, establishing towns like Alliance, Brotmanville, and Norma. The focus also began to move — from farming to factories, while building several schools. At its height, 12,000 Jewish people lived in the colony and its surrounding area.

Filmmaker Susan Donnelly, whose great-great grandparents were among the founders of the Alliance Colony, is the director of the documentary Alliance, which shows on Nov. 12 and then again on Nov. 15, as part of Philadelphia Jewish Film and Media’s Fall Fest.

“This is a film about stories,” Donnelly, who grew up hearing about the colony from an uncle, says during the opening narration. “From my family and other families who descended from the Alliance Colony, passed down from generation to generation.” The uncle has since passed away, but Donnelly speaks in the film about sharing the story with her children.

The colony ultimately declined starting in the 1920s, in part due to a desire of its people to live closer to cities, but its legacy continues.

The colony’s Tifereth Israel synagogue, one of the oldest in the country, has survived as has the cemetery where generations of Alliance residents are buried. You can still see Jewish stars on many of the buildings in the area, even though the character of the area is much less Jewish now than it was during the colony’s heyday. Several of the streets in the area, like Rosenfeldt and Shiff Avenues, are named for benefactors to the original colony.

Reunions of colony families are held periodically, and descendants of the Alliance Colony frequently share memories and family photographs in an active Facebook group. Stockton University’s Alliance Heritage Center is dedicated to preserving the memory of the colony.

“There’s something about this place that draws us all back,” Jarrett Ross, a genealogist and descendant of a colony family, says in the film. “One of the things that makes Alliance so special is how similar it looks to when our families were all here… when you come here to Alliance, it’s still farmland, it’s the same synagogue that we’re sitting in, it’s a lot of the same houses that are around here.” In fact, a nascent modern-day farming movement has gained purchase in recent years.

» READ MORE: In Salem County, farming links Black and Jewish families — and history

Thomas Kinsella, the director of the Alliance Heritage Center and a literature professor at Stockton, described Alliance to The Inquirer as “a documentary concerned with emigration, immigration, and integration,” and added that the film “provides clear context for why the colonists came to South Jersey, how they fared, and how the community developed over time.”

“They were not worldly, they sacrificed one entire generation there for their children, and if you read the literature on their children, and who they were and what they became, it’s amazing,” Jay Greenblatt, a retired lawyer and colony descendant involved with Alliance Colony preservation efforts, says in the documentary.

Alliance plays Nov. 12 at 4 p.m. at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History, and is one of several films showing this year at the Philadelphia Jewish Film and Media’s Fall Fest, which runs through Nov. 18. The festival begins Nov. 11 with Remembering Gene Wilder, a documentary about the late comedy legend who starred in Blazing Saddles, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and numerous films with Richard Pryor. An encore screening of Alliance will take place Nov. 15 at 2 p.m. at Gratz College in Elkins Park.