Dr. Joseph A. Rosen, noted agronomist and colonization authority who directed the resettlement of 250,000 Jews on farms in the Crimea and Ukraine after World War I. died last night at his home here. He was 73 years old.
As director of the American Jewish Joint Agricultural Corporation (Agro-Joint), he supervised farm settlement projects in Russia in behalf of Jews who had been deprived of their citizenship rights following the Russian revolution. From 1924 to 1937 he directed the administration of some $16,000,000, provided to Agro-Joint by the Joint Distribution Committee. Dr. Rosen was also the discoverer of “Rosen rye,” a new variety of winter rye, which is now grown all over the United States.
Born in Moscow in I876, Dr, Rosen left Czarist Russia to study at the University of Heidelberg, and came to the United States in 1903. He found employment as a farm worker for two years and then attended Michigan Agricultural College, where he received the degree of Master of Agriculture. Later he received his doctorate in agricultural chemistry at the University of Minnesota. From 1915 to 1918, Dr. Rosen directed the Baron de Hirsch Agricultural School in Woodbine, N.J.
Dr. Rosen’s knowledge and services were utilized in 1939 when he joined a special commission, appointed jointly by the British Government and President Roosevelt’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, to survey the possibilities of refugee resettlement in British Guiana. In 1940 Dr. Rosen directed the resettlement of refugees in the Dominican Republic. As vice-president of the Dominican Republic Settlement Association, Inc., he made several trips to the colony at Sosua.
Edward M.M. Warburg, J.D.C. chairman, declared in a statement that “Dr. Joseph A. Rosen was one of those men who put vast scientific gifts at the service of humanity. His life was devoted both to increasing the productiveness of the soil and its products and to teaching men how to make better use of the bounty of nature. He has left behind two great monuments to his memory, his Rosen rye, which still grows on America’s farms, and his great labors in the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of distressed Jews on the land.”
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