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US Immigration Highlights
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1881-1914 Jewish Immigration from Easter Europe
More than 2 million Jews migrated to America from Eastern Europe between 1881 and 1914: about 1.6 million from the Russian Empire (including Poland), 380,000 from Austria-Hungary (mainly Galicia), and 80,000 from Romania. These represented about three-quarters of the total Jewish emigration flow out of Eastern Europe. Most of them settled in the great commercial, industrial, and cultural centers: NY, then Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Chicago). -
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1881-1920 Third Wave Immigration
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Motivations for Jewish Immigration from Eastern Europe
The nineteenth-century population explosion in East European Jewry fueled this wave of immigration. This growth tended to exacerbate the endemic poverty that plagued communities in the region. Added to this were the increasingly bloody outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence and discriminatory government policies (including an 1891 Decree passed expelling Jews from Moscow which expelled 20,000 Jewish citizens) which heightened Jewish motivations for departure. -
Living Conditions - Tenements
Many Jewish immigrants moved into the Lower East Side of NYC where they lived in tenements. Tenements were notoriously small in size, most contained no more than two rooms. Personal hygiene became an issue because of the lack of running water and the garbage that piled up on the streets, it became difficult for those living in tenements to bathe properly or launder their clothing. This triggered the spread of diseases such as cholera, typhoid, smallpox, and tuberculosis. -
Jobs: A Worker Culture
Jewish immigrants mainly worked in the garment industry, petty trade, cigar manufacture, construction, and food production. Around 1910, the Jewish trade union movement emerged as a formidable force, supported by over a quarter of a million workers. A flourishing Yiddish culture–poetry, prose, and drama–revolved mostly around the themes of the hardships of the Jewish worker’s life, expressing the reality of daily existence within a community of immigrants. -
1915 lynching of the Jewish Atlanta businessman Leo Frank, who had been unjustly convicted of the rape and murder of an employee.
While overt hatred, particularly in the South, was generally directed against members of racial minorities, such feelings were also occasionally directed against Jews. The most blatant example was this lynching. Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company and a major figure in business during the 1920’s, regularly published anti-Semitic editorials in his own newspaper, the Dearborn Independent. -
Dr. Adams was born at Fort Dix, Pemberton, NJ
