The New Jewish Immigrants

Rabbi Melanie Aron

August 28, 2004

Earlier in our service, Emily told a moving story about a stranger helping a Jewish woman while on a bus in Nazi Germany. This story, included in Rabbi Lawrence Kushner’s book Invisible Lines of Connection: Sacred Stories of the Ordinary, was told to Rabbi Lawrence Kushner by his student Shifra Penzias who was at that time a rabbinical student at the New York school of the Hebrew Union College. The story was about her great aunt Sussie, and is one of the most striking reminders to me of the rabbinic teaching which we sang last night, “Anyone who saves one life, it is as if they have saved an entire world.” Those who rescued individual Jews during the Holocaust, enabled whole families to be established after the war, families that have gone on to enrich our world in many ways.

Shifra Penzia’s father Arno Penzias is a well known Nobel Prize winning physicist. His serendipitous discovery of evidence of the Big Bang in the disruptive static in an experiment he was doing at Bell Labs, changed the way physicist look at the universe. Arno Penzias was born in Europe and lived a comfortable happy live in Germany until his 6th birthday. In 1939 his family was deported to Poland, and in his memoirs he notes, that at that point he realized that there were events in the world from which his loving family could not protect him. Fortunately, he and his brother were able to join a group of children taken to England, and from there he made his way to the United States in 1940. When in 1998 Rabbi Shifra Penzias led an effort to enlist the support of rabbis and cantors for strawberry workers suffering poor working conditions, she mentioned her family’s history as a factor prompting her efforts for social justice.

This summer at services I have been sharing important moments in American Jewish History as part of our congregation’s marking the 350th anniversary of Jewish life in America. This morning I’d like to use the Penzia’s story to talk about immigration to America in the recent past.

Many of us are aware of the three major waves of Jewish immigration that shaped our American Jewish community. First were the Sephardic Jews who came in the colonial and revolutionary war period, living along the eastern seaboard. They participated actively in American society and were successful economically. They were followed by a migration of Jews from Germany and central Europe, beginning in the 1830’s who spread out throughout the country, often beginning as peddlers, and then establishing stores and eventually chains. This is the group that founded Temple Emanu-El of San Francisco and San Jose.

Most of us are descendents of the largest group of Jewish immigrants, those from Eastern Europe who began arriving in the 1880’s and continued to come to America until the doors were shut following World War I by a rising tied of American zenophobia and America First-ism. Many of these immigrants began their work lives in the sweatshops of the larger east coast cities, struggling so that their children could have a better life.

Many of us are less aware of two later waves of immigrants, which have also played an important role in shaping our American Jewish community. Between 1933-1945 200,000 Jewish refugees were admitted to the United States. While that is more than were admitted to any European country, it was of course only the smallest fraction of those who could have been saved. Anti-immigrant feeling and anti-Semitism were at a high point in the United States in the 1930’s. Henry Ford had published the Protocols of the Elders of Zion while others, like Father Coughlin spewed hate on the radio. A poll completed in 1938 found that only 5% of Americans favored increasing quotas for immigrants while 67% agreed with the statement, “with conditions as they are, we should try to keep them out.” Even among American Jews, 25% opposed increasing immigration fearing that increasing immigration of Jewish refugees would increase anti-Semitism in America. Jonathan Sarna, writing about this period, notes that it is “astounding, given the magnitude of American Anti-semitism and nativism” that American Jews were able to get as many refugees into this country as they did. The attitude of the State department to all requests was to “postpone, postpone, postpone” and immigration laws were interpreted in the most unfavorable way. Following the war and the revelation of Nazi horrors, immigration laws were somewhat relaxed and the survivors of the camps were given permission to enter the United States.

Those refugees whose lives were saved, included many scholars, political and cultural figures, rabbis and Jewish scholars. These immigrants made a disproportionate impact on American life. On the one hand, they were some of America’s greatest scientists, social scientists, humanists and artists, earning, for example 12 Nobel Prizes in physics alone. On the other hand, they are also remembered for their contribution to a renaissance of Jewish religious life and scholarship in America and particularly to the establishment of the institutions of American orthodoxy and Chasidism.

Since 1980 we have seen another wave of immigration, beginning with the trickle of Jewish immigrants at the end of the Soviet Period, and influenced also by the fall of the Shah, insecurity in South Africa and other countries around the world, and by difficult circumstances in Israel. The Year 2000 Jewish population survey estimates that almost one in ten American Jewish households includes someone not born in the United States. About 2/3 of the 340,000 immigrant adults come from the former Soviet Union. Of the remaining 1/3 of American Jewish immigrants, one half come from either Israel, Canada or Iran with current estimates of Israeli adults in the US hovering at about 100,000. These two streams of immigration are very different. The Jews from the FSU tend to be older, including many elderly Jews, they tend to settle in the northeast, and almost half have a household income of less than $15,000, often forced to work outside their professions when they come to America. Jewish immigrants from Israel, Canada, Iran, or other countries, tend to be much younger, to settle more frequently in the south and west, and to experience economic success in America. The Jews from the FSU tend to be very strongly culturally and ethnically Jewish, reporting that most of their close friends are Jewish and that living near other Jews is very important to them, yet of all groups in American Judaism they are least likely to affiliate with a synagogue, light candles or have a mezuzah on their door. Of course, this is easily understood in light of their experiences during the Soviet Period.

In Israel the impact of the last decade’s immigration of Soviet and Ethiopian Jews has been very profound. My hunch is that in the United States, the talents of this way of immigration in science, sports, literature, and even comedy, will be felt more and more significantly in the decade ahead.