After Spending hours going -wading through the deeply heart wrenching history of the life of the Jews in the "Pale of Settlement". One cannot fully comprehend just how immensely hard life was for our ancestors in Eastern Europe.
One sees just how those "Lucky" Jews of the enlightened and educated "Western Europe" who were "emancipated" from the Ghettos under the reign of Napoleon!
Freed from the "Shackles" they rushed to be accepted and to "adopt" and assimilate. They did this but changing or "Reforming" their Judaism like their neighbors and by accepting modern ways, education and clothing.
Their neighbors who were "enlightened" as "Protestants" revoked the ways of the Roman Catholic Church saw the world "differently" and gave the Jews of "Western Europe" encouragement to seek lives differently.
The Orthodox religious Jews of the "Pale of Settlement"- my Paternal Grandfather's family -lived their lives day by day under the oppression of the whim of the Czar and the evil backward Russian Orthodox Church that controlled the lives of their neighbors who constantly abused, robbed and on a whim murdered their neighbors.
As I read through the stories of desperation and the need for solace it is no wonder there were so many different Chassidic Movements who sought spiritual escapism.
As you research you see how in the period from 1880, the beginnings of the movements of Zionism and of Haskala -Education. Like rays of sunshine penetrating the dark curtains of their homes.
For the "Ohevi Zion"-Ḥibat Tsiyon (Love of Zion) the trek to Eretz Yisrael was hampered by Islamic hatred of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. The life of a "Helutz"- Pioneer (settler) was fraught with danger and disease.
To those Jews living in the "Pale of Settlement" who wished to leave to a "better place", the news these potential pioneers received was disheartening to say the least. The passage to Eretz Yisrael was not really open and there was imminent danger every step of the way. The area was very poor and most religious Jews who had reached Eretz Yisreal experienced servere hardships.
In this period of time, one by one, family and shtetl members are leaving fleeing to England, Canada or to the preferred goldene medina – “golden country” (in Yiddish, a phrase referring to America as a land of opportunity" were there was the "easier less threat of death) ability to succeed and to live a better life. After the years of extreme oppression and suffering the easy way of life called out to them.
In the west - England, Canada and America these "pioneer Jews" fleeing the "Pale of Settlement" found it easier to adjust. As soon as one would find employment, establish a business and built a home. He would send for his brothers and sistera to join him. They would also try to make matches between those who "had made it" with their relatives thereby expanding the circle of Jews in many locations in England, Canada and America.
To me it is absolutely a no brainer that the words on the statue of Liberty come from "a member of the tribe" Emma Lazarus-The New Colossus:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Just who was Emma Lazarus?
She was born in New York City, July 22, 1849, into a large Sephardic Jewish family. She was the fourth of seven children of Moses Lazarus, a wealthy Jewish merchant and sugar refiner, and Esther Nathan. One of her great-grandfathers on the Lazarus side was from Germany; the rest of her Lazarus and Nathan ancestors were originally from Portugal and resident in New York long before the American Revolution, being among the original twenty-three Portuguese Jews who arrived in New Amsterdam fleeing the Inquisition from their settlement of Recife, Brazil.
Coming back to the research on the Jews of "The Pale of Settlement" I see how the storm clouds in Europe and old hatreds arise from the cesspool during World War I and how in the intervening years of the Bolshevik revolution how death and destruction convulses over the already impoverished and decimated Jewish communities who continue to eek out and cling to life. How pitiful their meager existence.
I force myself to read the eyewitness testimony...my heart breaks with emotion...I cry. When I read the words I see them, I hear them they say to me; "Please say Kaddish for me."
I see the infants, I want to hold them and comfort them ...
I see the young children, like my children and grandchildren and I want to sweep them up into my arms and flee with them ...but alas....the doors of the world were slammed shut by that age old hatred.
“We used to uncover the graves where there were people who had been killed during the past three years, take out the bodies, pile them up in tiers and burn these bodies, grind the bones, take out the valuables in the ashes, such as gold teeth, rings and so on, and separate them. After grinding the bones we would throw the ashes up in the air so that they would disappear, replace the earth over the graves, and plant seeds so that nobody could recognize that there was once a grave there."
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