The Kosher Bookworm: A hidden chapter of American Jewish History and Ellis Island

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Reviewed by Alan Jay Gerber

Issue of August 14, 2009 / 24 Av 5769

Were I to survey readers and ask them to identify Benjamin Harrison, I’m certain many would not be able to offer a correct answer. Yet, though little known and even less hailed, U.S. President Benjamin Harrison played a crucial role in the immigration of Eastern European Jewry to this country in the 1890’s and into the early decades of the 20th century.

Journalist and historian Vincent J. Cannato recently published, ”American Passage: The History of Ellis Island” (Harper Collins, 2009). In this comprehensive 487 page history are to be found detailed facts, stories, personalities, and geographic as well as political details, that spell out the history of one of the most fabled islands on the American continent, Ellis Island, New York.

To American Jewry, especially those who came from Eastern Europe from the late 1880’s to the late 1920’s, Ellis Island, with its backdrop of the Statue of Liberty, represented the portal to a new world, a world of religious and economic freedom never before experienced by Jews in the Diaspora.

This book, in part, tells their story.

One particular episode in this book not only drew my immediate attention, it truly  came to represent  all that America has come to mean to  me as one who cares so much for the welfare of this blessed republic.

In 1891, President Harrison   appointed   a special commission to investigate what motivated the mass immigration of millions of  Europeans to the United States. He also, through this commission, wanted to know to what extent criminals, paupers, the insane and those afflicted with dangerous diseases were encouraged to emigrate to these shores.

As if these legitimate concerns were not enough to concern the Harrison Administration, there was another concern that bothered  Harrison, that of the increasing number of Russian Jews landing on these shores.

As a reward for his help in getting him elected in 1888, Harrison appointed his Civil War buddy John B. Weber as commissioner of immigration at the Port of New York and, in addition, to oversee the construction of new immigration intake  facilities at Ellis Island. In addition to all the above, Harrison entrusted into Weber’s hands the chairmanship of the special commission. This was to prove to be a most fateful decision to the future of American Jewry.

Before Weber set sail for Europe, Harrison called him to his seaside cottage at Cape May, N.J., were he was vacationing, to task him with one additional mission: to personally investigate the condition of Russian Jewry and to report back directly to him on this matter.

On his way to Europe Weber was joined by his  traveling  companion,  Dr. Walter  Kempster, a fellow Civil War vet who fought at Gettysburg.

Together, according to Cannato, they city-hopped from Liverpool to Paris, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Berlin and then on to cities not normally on the itineraries of American diplomats of that era. They then visited St. Petersburg, Moscow, Minsk, Vilna, Bialystok, Grodno, Warsaw, Cracow, Budapest, and Vienna. They ended up in Bremen, Germany.

During this trip they met with members of the U.S. diplomatic corp in each city and country, visited local Jewish neighborhoods, and spoke with officials from the various steamship lines. It was a grueling yet productive fact-gathering mission for President Harrison.

Weber and Kempster issued their report in January 1892. They came to the conclusion that people left Europe largely because of “superior conditions of living in the United States,”  They  received this impression from others, including friends and relatives who preceded them to these shores. The report also detail the horrid conditions under which the Jews of Russia lived.

Cannato noted that, “Following his instructions from Harrison, Weber paid special attention to the plight of Jews. The situation in Russia was beginning to have repercussions for the United States. Mary Antin had already emigrated and wrote a memoire of her family’s journey from Russia to America. During those bleak times, she wrote, ‘America was in everybody’s mouth. Businessmen talked of it over their accounts... people who had relatives in the famous land went around reading their letters’. The number of immigrants coming from Russia, the vast majority Jewish, was increasing dramatically.....”

The author goes into great detail as to what motivated this human deluge and of the anti-Semitic reaction here to this.  Weber and Kempster did not hide their sympathy for the Jews they encountered in the Pale of Settlement and were very candid with Harrison about what they witnessed. In effect, the Weber-Kempster Report was a sharp and severe rebuke to those bigots who wished to curtail and ultimately restrict Jewish East European immigration in its infancy.

We have a lot to be grateful for to President Benjamin Harrison and his appointees, Weber and Klempster, for their personal resolve and exercise of true leadership, and for their sincere acts of brotherhood toward our people in a time of dire distress. What they did, did not have to be done. They could have easily played along with the mob and restricted Jewish immigration, and thus prevented the establishment of the large American Jewish community of which we are a proud part to this very day. Let us not forget this fact, and of the personalities who played crucial roles in making this possible.

If you have not yet visited Ellis Island and its museum, do so, with your kids, before the end of summer vacation. It will be an experience that you will never forget.

And, while you are at it, do read “American Passage” and enjoy the scholarship of a most gifted journalist and historian, Vincent Cannato. This will surely help enrich your visit to Ellis Island, and reinforce your love for our country and its history.