Jewish Immigration Research Paper

Max Seidman
Mrs. Dowd Period 4
3/26/15
The Life of a Jewish Immigrant In the U.S. Immigrating to the United States was a long, difficult, and expensive process. A minority of European immigrants, who were a majority of those that came to the states, had opportunities to be lucky and successful; a majority worked long hours for less than what is possible to live off of. A great deal of the new immigrants came from countries that didn’t have a democratic government, such as Russia and Italy. Many immigrants were confused by the elections of politicians. It was an expensive journey, and hard to get the jobs. Crowds would come over and after a long time, they would either pay for their family to come across the ocean, or they would go home with …show more content…
There was much anti-semitism and the Russian government restricted many of the Jews from participating in their daily religious rituals. The government organized pogroms, in which mass numbers of Jews were massacred. If this wasn’t enough, the Jews in Russia and Poland were living in great poverty, which was one of the biggest motivations for them to come to America (Morovitz). Mary Antin describes describes how horrible the conditions were and the length of the trip of her immigration journey to the U.S. She wrote, “...for sixteen days the ship was our world… It does not shrink from describing the torments of seasickness; it notes every change in the weather. A rough night is described, when the ship pitched and rolled so that people were thrown from their berths; days and nights when we crawled through dense fogs, our fog-horn drawing answering warnings from invisible ships. The perils of the sea were not minimized in the imaginations of us inexperienced voyagers… we frightened emigrants turned our faces to the wall and awaited our watery graves” (IIIX). Even though it only took her sixteen days to get to America, they were tormented with “seasickness,” meaning that they were constantly feeling ill do to the rocking of the ship. The ship “pitched and rolled,” making the conditions much worse. During nights on the swaying boat, passengers were tossed …show more content…
In general, immigrants weren’t treaty poorly; the worst part of the process was the stress of being let past the immigration officers. Very few of the immigrants spoke English, and if they did, it would be very little. Most had no clue what was going on around them because they were unable to understand what they were being told. They would have been overwhelmed by the crowds of people waiting to go through. Antin and her family were also forced to assimilate into American society. Their first step was changing their names, a common process for immigrants because they had names that were too difficult for the officials to pronounce (Schmelz). Antin describes this process as something that the family prepared for by having a committee of friends decide on a new name. She says, “...we shed also our impossible Hebrew names. A committee of our friends… put their heads together and concocted American names for us all. My mother...nickname of Annie. Fetchke, Joseph, and Deborah issued as Frieda, Joseph, and Dora, respectively.... Marya (Mar-ya), my friends said that it would hold good in English as Mary; which was very disappointing, as I longed to possess a strange-sounding American name like the others” (IX). In order to seem more American, and to help the officers, the Antin family had come to Ellis Island with new names prepare. This

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