Jewish Emigration.
In 1882 an extensive programme of emigration to America was organized and directed from Liverpool; and during the year of the Russo-Jewish persecutions 6,274 persons were sent, at a cost which amounted to over £30,000 ($50,000), to the United States and Canada in thirty-one steamships from the Port of Liverpool.
The ports of Le Havre, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Genoa and especially Liverpool were all important ports of emigration.
American Jewish history is characterized by three waves of immigrants from three different parts of Europe. The economic, social and religious mores of the three groups were distinct from one another. In colonial times,Jews settled along the Atlantic coast and in several southern states.
During the 17th century, Rhode Island was the only New England colony which allowed a permanent Jewish community.
The second period in American Jewish history was dominated by German Jewry. Coming out of an assimilated, emancipated background, German Jews were prompted to emigrate by the scarcity of land, rural poverty and government restrictions on marriage, domicile and employment.
Although there were German Jews in America before the early 19th Century, it is after that time that they became the predominant Jewish cultural group.
Coming to America in a period of rapid geographic expansion, the German Jews became part of the developing Midwest. Communities were established in Chicago, Cincinnati, Indianapolis and St. Paul. Wherever they settled, they formed a congregation and bought land for a cemetery.
These immigrants came to America in search of democracy. This is reflected in their overall concern for Jewish communal conditions. Religious, philanthropic and fraternal organizations were founded during this period. The third wave of Jewish immigrants into the United States was also the largest.
Jews who were fleeing restrictions and extreme persecutions (pogroms) came from Poland and Russia. In 1904, the Tsarist Government established the Pale of Settlement, Jewish settlement in the Empire was restricted to that area.
The Russian pogroms (1881-84 and 1903-06) resulted in heavy Jewish emigration to Western Europe and the United States. Because of the pogroms, the profile of the Russian Jewish immigrant differed greatly from that of the German Jew. The latter came largely as single men; the former were entire family groups. Within the Russian Jewish masses who came to America were groups of Hasidic Jews.
Their development and maintenance of a Yiddish culture (Yiddishkeit) also served to uphold their cultural differences.
Many members of the present day Jewish community in Liverpool originated from the surge of Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe who travelled by land across europe to emigrate via Liverpool, to the United States in the late nineteenth century.
Next P 9.
Liverpool's Historic Connections to America.
Discover the connections between the City of Liverpool and America,
which have existed from the sixteenth century, right up to the present time.
Discover the connections between the City of Liverpool and America,
which have existed from the sixteenth century, right up to the present time.
Page 8.