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Through the figures of Elias Schwarzfeld, Sigismond Sonnenfeld and Emile Meyerson, leaders of the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA), this article outlines the role of this Paris-based organization and the spirit in which its leaders promoted the great Jewish emigration from Central and Eastern Europe to the Americas before 1914. Born between 1847 and 1859 in Romania, Hungary and Poland, these three men settled in France in the 1880s, where they supervised (in close collaboration with the Alliance israélite universelle) JCA projects in both the old and new world. The article analyzes the trajectories of these three men, who had themselves emigrated from Eastern Europe, and went on to work as gobetweens to facilitate the departure towards the West for others.