There was urgent need of uniting these emigration societies scattered all over the Pale of Settlement and of establishing central emigration committees to regulate the movement which had gripped the people with elemental force.
Unfortunately, there was no unity of purpose among the Jewish leaders in Russia.

The intellectuals who stood nearer to the people, such as the well-known oculist, Professor Mandelstamm, who enjoyed great popularity in Kiev, and others like him, as well as a section of the Jewish press, particularly the _Bazsvyet_, insisted continually on the necessity of organizing the emigration movement, which they regarded as the most important task confronting Russian Jewry at that time.

The Jewish oligarchy in St.Petersburg, on the other hand, was afraid lest such an undertaking might expose it to the charge of "disloyalty" and of a lack of Russian patriotism.

Others again, whose sentiments were voiced by the Russian-Jewish periodical _Voskhod_ and who were of a more radical turn of mind, looked upon the attempt to encourage a wholesale emigration of Jews as a concession to the Government of Ignatyev and as an indirect abandonment of the struggle for emancipation in Russia itself.
In the spring of 1882, the question of organizing the emigration movement had become so pressing that it was decided to convene a conference of provincial Jewish leaders in St.Petersburg to consider the problem.

Before the delegates had time to arrive in the capital, the sky of South Russia was once more lit up by a terrible flare.