Through the Golden Door
FRIEDMAN, HERBERT A.
BOOKS Through the Golden Door Shores of Refuge. A Hundred Years of Jewish Emigration by Ronald Sanders Henry Holt and Company, 1988 673 pp, $27 95 Reviewed by Herbert A. Friedman It was ironic...
...With Shores of Refuge, he has produced a detailed story, carefully researched and fully annotated with relevant quotations from contemporary press reports of a century of immigration, 1881 to the present...
...This led to increased tension, and within a few weeks, rioting broke out between reactionary pogromists and Jews in Yelizavetgrad, Kiev and Odessa, with the police and government essentially standing aside while murder and mayhem spread...
...Jewry, I have found helpful a mnemonic device that relates Jewish population numbers to the key wars in American history, the dates of which everyone knows...
...Opening with the Russian migration which started the century, the book closes with the Russian immigration marking the end of the century...
...But the Jews considered New York more attractive, for many reasons, and while some thousands did go to South America, the majority preferred the north...
...Tolstoy condemned the Russian government for not protecting the Jews...
...By the Revolutionary War, there were approximately 3,000 Jews in the United States (the Sephardic wave...
...And thanks to Ronald Sanders for the long years of hard work which created this useful volume...
...The Kishinev pogrom in 1903 galvanized an ever-greater flow...
...American Jewish organizations began to form, corresponding with the European ones already started in France, Germany, Austria and England...
...It is this last wave which is the subject of Sanders' volume...
...Castle Garden, at the tip of Manhattan in Battery Park, was the point of disembarkation...
...A National Origins Quota Act was passed in 1924...
...the move was by sea to Hull, on the east coast of England, by train across to Liverpool, and by ship to America...
...Alexander Ill's closest advisers, Konstantin Pobedonostsev and Count Ignatiev, urged him to stamp out the revolutionary movement...
...In that year Baron de Hirsch in Paris had funded the Jewish Colonization Association to take 25,000 to Argentina, and up to 3.5 million over the next 25 years, in order to relieve some of the pressure on the United States...
...After the war, the mood in the United States shifted and immigration restrictions began to appear in congressional legislation, fomented by Attorney General Palmer, who considered immigrants from Russia a "Red Scare...
...The sea voyage was dreadful, with people vomiting all over each other in the impossibly crowded steerage, sanitary facilities almost non-existent, and food so rotten that when the seasickness subsided, they still could not eat...
...Immigrants from Russia moved eastward instead, and refugee communities developed in Harbin, China and Yokohama, Japan...
...the Council of Jewish Women was organized that year to care for single females...
...Regarding Churchill, Sanders says, ' 'There is ample reason to believe that his sympathies with the Jewish plight were strong, but he was . . . less able to act directly upon them...
...HIAS, like the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and a few others, has always been low-profile, modest and seldom guilty of self-serving publicity...
...The riots were severe...
...The Alliance Israelite Universelle (a French organization) opened an office there to offer help...
...This book will supply much of the human interest elements of the flight to freedom and the first difficult years of adjustment...
...Most American Jews today stem from Eastern European origins, and are eager to know about their roots...
...the American Jewish Committee was founded three years later, and Galveston, Texas was opened as an alternate port in 1907...
...But the evidence Sanders offers to back up his statement is not persuasive...
...When war broke out in 1914, travel across the Atlantic became almost impossible, because of U-boats and the shortage of shipping for any purposes other than military...
...Sanders calls this period ' 'the worst Holocaust the Jewish people had ever known...
...First he quotes David Wyman's The Abandonment of the Jews, which says, "Franklin Roosevelt's indifference to . . . the systematic annihilation of European Jewry emerges as the worst failure of his presidency," and then rebuts it, saying, "Such judgments may be too harsh . . . FDR was the least indifferent . . . of all the heads of government of his time...
...In Russia, anti-Semitism had a fierce potency, supported by intellectuals, among them Dostoevsky...
...by the Civil War, 300,000 (the German-Austrian wave...
...To keep things in perspective, this group was but a small portion of the 800,000 refugees who came from a dozen countries in Europe that year...
...The long, thin line of flight started in 1881 from the town of Brody, just across the Russian border in Galicia...
...It was directed by Charles Netter, the same man who, ten years earlier, opened the first agricultural school at Mikveh Israel, outside of Jaffa, for a dozen young Sephardic students, one of whom was shot by a Bedouin, thus becoming the first casualty in the Arab-Israeli "Hundred Years' War...
...It is a compliment to both author and institution that the book has none of the taint of puffery which all too often accompanies a public relations-inspired approach to an organization's achievements...
...What was the value of sympathies when action was required, and not forthcoming from either leader...
...In that year, the total number of Jews arriving in the United States from all countries of origin was only 10,000, and the period of mass immigration was clearly over...
...The concluding portion of the book, about 200 pages, deals with the Nazi era, especially in relation to where and how Jews escaped to new lands...
...It was almost as if the pieces on the chess board were being moved around to be in the right place at the right time...
...During 1882, the first full year of the immigrant flood, 13,000Jews entered the United States...
...For some reason, the author felt compelled to write an afterword, in which he exonerates both Roosevelt and Churchill...
...The all-time high for Jewish immigration in one year was 154,000 in 1906...
...and by World War I, 3 million (the Russian-Polish wave...
...President Roosevelt intervened with the Czar...
...The flight continued from Lemberg, Cracow, Breslau or Berlin to Hamburg...
...Was history (or God) aware in 1881 that it would be necessary to have a strong, powerful, self-reliant Jewish community existing in America 75 or so years in the future, to be available to lend support to the newlyborn Israel...
...The exact death toll is unknown but is estimated between 30,000 and 100,000...
...Jewish youth became radicalized, developing at the same time a nationalist sentiment...
...The book, as a whole, is an excellent document for those who would understand the earthquakes that have shaken our era...
...Jacob Schiff was the financial and moral force behind much of the American work...
...Ronald Sanders, author of The High Walls of Jerusalem, Lost Tribes and Promised Lands, The Downtown Jews and other works, is a professional writer of great competence...
...Thousands of immigrants gathered there...
...The book was made possible through a grant to HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) from the Liskin Foundation...
...The famous Russian poet Chaim Bialik wrote a poem entitled "The City of Slaughter...
...There was no Jewish quota as such, but the Polish quota was less than 6,000 per year...
...As the volume increased, Ellis Island, a much larger installation, took over...
...This gives the reader a clear picture of the great migration of East European Jews to the United States in the first 50 years, as well as other smaller waves to and from other places in the second half of the century...
...I frankly do not understand the motive for this afterword...
...This book emphasizes the client-in-need, rather than the organization-in-search-of-credit...
...Finally, the dam broke with Alexander's proclamation in May 1881 calling for the emigration of one-third of the Jews, forcible conversion of another third, and death for the final third...
...Third and fourth generation American-born children do not even know the names of the towns in which their grandparents and great-grandparents were born, let alone many details of the culture, language and religion that nourished their sense of Jewish identity...
...There is something mysterious in the timing...
...A Hundred Years of Jewish Emigration by Ronald Sanders Henry Holt and Company, 1988 673 pp, $27 95 Reviewed by Herbert A. Friedman It was ironic that Alexander II, having freed 60 million Russian serfs in 1861, and even before that having abolished the cruel cantonist system of conscripting 12-year-old Jewish boys for 25-year terms of military service, was assassinated by a bomb in March 1881 by revolutionaries seeking even more liberalization...
...By 1891, Jews were arriving at an annual rate of 100,000...
...the bitter fight conducted by Breckenridge Long, assistant secretary of state, to keep Jews out of the United States, and the equally bitter effort of the British to reduce immigration into Palestine...
...He is one of the builders of the state of Israel, from his involvement in the Haganah in pre-state years to his position as executive chairman of the National United Jewish Appeal for 25 years...
...That started the flood of emigration, primarily to the United States, but also to Palestine...
...When the war ended there were major pogroms in Berditchev, Zhitomir and elsewhere in the Ukraine...
...Rabbi Herbert A. Friedman is the president of the Wexner Heritage Foundation...
...At the moment of greatest Jewish need, from 1933 onwards, the two most influential and genuinely democratic countries in the world were blind to that need, and millions of Jews perished...
...Looking at the century in this manner relieves some of the despair and horror which marked its middle, for migration always carries with it the message of a new beginning and a new life...
...Thank God (or history) that they were...
...In teaching the history of U.S...
...What followed was the reverse...
Vol. 13 • October 1988 • No. 7
