Where they came from - the Pale of Settlement

Some Jews would come from Galicia, then a province of Austria-Hungary, and from Romania, but most came from the Russian Empire. In the late 19th century, enlarged by its acquisitions of much of Poland, including Lithuania, Russia was home to the world's largest Jewish population. It restricted Jews without special permission to residing within the Pale (the boundaries) of Settlement. Five million Jews lived there, nearly all in towns (shtetlach) and villages, for even within the Pale, cities like Kiev were closed to Jews.

Russia would allow Jews who had become more "Russian" to live outside the Pale of Settlement. That could be done several ways. First, by conversion to Christianity. Then by higher education - but quotas of five percent Jewish enrollment, where Jews were perhaps 15 percent of the population, limited that option. Army service was also a way out. But conscription was dreaded, for it would take boys for up to 25 years into a strange, hostile setting that would try to convert them.

But Russia had no objection to its Jews leaving.
 

The great wave of Jewish immigration  1880 - 1924

The wave begins

The pogroms that began in 1881 after the Tsar's assassination would lead to massive departures. A few Jews would leave for Palestine. Many would go to England or Canada. But most would leave for the United States where there were few barriers to entry, a growing economy, and relatives and others from their old home towns (landsmen) who would welcome them.

All across our nation, communities of Jews from eastern Europe began to form and grow. As the stories of economic opportunity and religious freedom in Die Goldene Medina (the golden land) made their way back to the shtetlach, others were encouraged to come. Thus, Jewish immigration would increase each decade.

Rosh Hashanah greeting card from the early 1900s.
Russian Jews, packs in hand, gaze at relatives
beckoning them to the United States.
Source: Wikipedia

The great wave ends

Jewish immigration would be almost completely shut down by widely supported measures whose aim was to cut down on all immigration from eastern and southern Europe.

• First, in 1917 admissions standards were raised and a literacy test imposed.
• Then a 1921 law, the Emergency Quota Act, limited the immigrants from a country to three percent of the number from that country who had lived here in 1910. For persons from eastern or southern Europe it was a 75 percent reduction from prior years.
• Last, the 1924 National Origins Act rolled back the base year to 1890, when few southern or eastern Europeans were here, and cut the percentage to two. The combined limit for eastern and southern Europe was now less than 22,000.

But by 1924, 2.5 million Jews had arrived. Unlike other immigrant groups, where as many as one-third might return home, relatively few Jews would go back to the "old country." After all, what did they have to go back to? Though the tale of virtually none returning to the Old Country is a myth.  more ....  

Twenty-five percent of the world's Jewish population now lived in the USA. 

From 1880 to 1924 thousands of immigrant Jewish families came to Cleveland. Its Jewish population increased almost 30 fold, from 3,500 in 1880 to 100,000 in 1920. Now we look at the story of one of these families: Sam and Minnie Klausner.

Continue: Sam and Minnie Klausner - From Russia to Cleveland