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Jewish History.org presents Rabbi Barry Wine's 5,000 Years of Jewish History, one video clip at a time. Clip number 69: Jewish Immigration to America.
The poverty and pogroms that racked Eastern European Jewry were the impetus for Jews to leave and go to other countries. The Russian government encouraged it. They said the borders were open because they were interested in being rid of them. They didn't want the Jews in Poland and Lithuania and Belarus, and therefore they encouraged Jews to leave. There was a great company, the Hamburg American Shipping Line, owned by a Jew, Albert Ballin, that had cheap steerage tickets to the United States. Between 1870 and the beginning of the First World War, two and a half million Jews left Eastern Europe, most of whom came to the United States. Some came to Canada, some to South Africa, which had a large Lithuanian Jewish population, and some as far as Australia and South America.
The Jews were determined to get out, but there were many Jews who didn't get out. In fact, the vast majority did not get out, either because they didn't want to or because they couldn't.
When the Jews arrived in the United States, the Eastern European Jews, who were mainly Orthodox and traditional, differed greatly from the Reform Jews who had laid the infrastructure for American Jewish society. Therefore, the federations and all of those organizations that dealt with the incoming refugees were determined to assimilate the Jews into American society as quickly as possible. The American public school system, the settlement houses, the Lower East Side, all of it was meant to ensure that, while they couldn't do much with the immigrants themselves, the next generation would be American and would not be Eastern European in any respect. Because of that, they felt certainly that they would not be observant Jews and that Orthodoxy was doomed in the New World. A century later, we can look back and say that that was a wrong assessment, but that was the assessment at that time.
Because of that, various strains of trying to accommodate Jewish life to American life arose. In the Orthodox camp there was the Young Israel movement, which gave a touch of modernity and attracted young people but kept them within the framework of Jewish observance and Jewish law. The Conservative movement then began at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Solomon Schechter was the head of the Seminary, a famous scholar from Cambridge, and they attempted to have a middle ground between traditional Orthodoxy on one hand and the Reform movement on the other. It was always a slippery slope for them and has continued to be so until today, when the movement, for various reasons, appears to be in definite decline.
In any event, the Jews came to America. They thought America was the golden land, and it was. It was the land of opportunity. The children and grandchildren no longer lived on the Lower East Side; they moved to fancier neighborhoods, they went to professional schools, and they began the long, arduous climb which, over the centuries, made Jews very accepted in American society, prosperous, and influential far beyond their numbers.
My name is Barry Wine, and I thank you for watching. For more on Jewish history, go to jewishhistory.org.