The Jewish National Fund (JNF) (1901 - Present) is a non-profit organization founded to buy and develop land in Ottoman Palestine for Jewish settlement. In 1897, at the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, Hermann Schapira, a German-Jewish professor of mathematics, proposed the idea of creating a national land-purchasing fund. That fund, named Keren Hakayemet ('Jewish National Fund' in English), was founded in 1901 at the Fifth Zionist Congress, which also took place in Basel. In 1903, The JNF acquired its first parcel of land, as a gift from Russian Zionist leader Leib Goldberg. The JNF played a central role in founding Tel Aviv in 1909. By 1921, the JNF owned almost 25,000 acres, and by 1927, that number had risen to 50,000 acres. The JNF held 89,500 acres at the end of 1935, upon which 108 Jewish communities had been founded. By 1939, 10% of the Jewish population living in the British Mandate of Palestine lived on JNF land. By 1948, the year of Israeli independence, the JNF owned 54% of the land owned by Jews in British Palestine, or about 4% of the land in the entire mandate. After the establishment of Israel, the new Israeli government sold over 2,000 square kilometers of land to the JNF between 1949 and 1950. The JNF was dissolved and reorganized in 1950, when it was renamed Keren Kayemet LeYisrael. The JNF-KKL transferred the administration of all its land, with the exception of forested areas, to the Israel Land Administration (ILA), a newly formed Israeli government agency, in 1960. With that, the ILA administered 93% of the land in Israel, since the Israeli government owned 80% and the JNF-KKL owned approximately 13%.



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