Jewish migration to the United States is divisible into periods. For each there are sources of information for doing genealogical research.

Dates ---------- Period ------------------- Number of Immigrants

1654–1838 ---- Colonial/federal --------- Fewer than 15,000
1838–80 ------- German emigration ---- 250,000
1881–1924 ---- Eastern European ------- 2,000,000
1924–44 ------- Pre-Holocaust ---------- 100,000
1945–60 ------- Holocaust survivors ---- 250,000
Present -------- Russian Jews & others -- Up to 50,000 per year

Colonial Period (1654-1838)
The first Jews to come to North America arrived in 1654 at the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (renamed New York in 1664). Most were refugees from the Dutch colony of Recife, Brazil, which was conquered by the Portuguese that year. The Jews, fearing persecution from the Portuguese Inquisition, left with plans to go to Holland, the home of many Sephardic Jews who had fled the Spanish Inquisition 150 years earlier. However, they ran out of money and were forced to land at the Dutch colony.

Because Jews in the New World were allowed to practice their religion in a relatively nondiscriminatory environment, record books of American synagogues exist back to colonial times. Besides New York, early Jewish settlements were founded in Savannah, Georgia (1733), Philadelphia (1745), Charleston, South Carolina (1749), Newport, Rhode Island (1763), and Richmond, Virginia (1789).

There are records for this period at the American Jewish Historical Society (10 Thornton Dr., Waltham MA 02154) and the American Jewish Archives (3101 Clifton Ave., Cincinnati, OH 45220), as well as at the synagogue archives themselves.

The definitive genealogical work, now in its third revision, is Rabbi Malcolm H. Stern, FASG, First American Jewish Families (Baltimore: Ottenheimer Publishers, 1991). It contains the genealogies (descendants) of every Jewish person known to the author who arrived in the United States before 1838. Some 50,000 persons are identified in it.

German Emigration (1838-80)
Much information about this group can be found using conventional American genealogical resources; little is available through synagogue records. Family historians who have attempted to do German emigration research, Jewish or Christian, know about the paucity of information available for tracing ancestry back to Germany. Ship’s manifests and citizenship papers provide no clue as to ancestral towns in Germany, so genealogists must dig for information. Family records or death records may hold clues. For example, Jewish immigrants who arrived in the nineteenth century are among the most difficult of Jewish ancestors to document; however, Jewish tombstones of German immigrants have been known to indicate the town of birth. Check census records as well; census takers sometimes wrote down the town of birth rather than the country of birth on the census record.

Most German Jews left through the ports of Hamburg and Bremen. Emigration lists from Hamburg for the years 1850 to 1934 have survived and are available on microfilm through the Family History Library of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, Utah. Two separate indexes exist, both arranged by year. One, called the direct index, lists ships that sailed directly to the United States. The other, the indirect index, lists ships that stopped at other ports prior to coming across the Atlantic. Virtually no lists from Bremen exist today. Those not destroyed in periodic purgings were destroyed in Bremen by bombing raids during World War II.¹

Eastern European Emigration (1881-1924)
In 1881, Czar Alexander II was assassinated, and the Russians blamed it on the Jews. Decades of pogroms against the Jewish population followed. This anti-Semitism and deplorable economic conditions drove millions of Jews from Eastern Europe; 2 million went to the United States. Most Jewish-Americans are descended from these persons, and there is a wealth of genealogical information about them.

Passenger Arrival Lists
To learn more about this wave of immigrants (Jewish and others), the U.S. government began documenting them more carefully during the 1890s. Passenger arrival records included age, occupation, nationality, town of last residence, final destination, and other data. Starting in 1906, place of birth was added, and in 1907 name and address of the nearest relative in the immigrant’s native country were added. The National Archives in Washington, D.C., has on microfilm the ships’ manifests and indexes to these lists. Copies of these microfilms are available through the Family History Library and regional branches of the National Archives. If access to any of these facilities is difficult, you can write to the National Archives, Washington, DC 20408, for copies. The process for obtaining copies by mail through the National Archives is time consuming, however, and may take up to six months. An alternative is to retain a professional genealogist in Washington, D.C., or Salt Lake City. For a nominal sum (usually less than twenty-five dollars), a professional genealogist can provide you with a copy in about one week.

Citizenship Papers
Most Jewish immigrants became citizens of the United States. Even those who did not usually went through the first step of applying and filled out a declaration of intention. The declarations of intention asked a number of questions, including date of birth, date of marriage, arrival date, name of ship, current address, and, in certain years, name at time of arrival in the United States. Consequently, it is a valuable resource for Jewish-American research. Because the submitter was the immigrant ancestor him- or herself, it is not unusual to find more accurate information, such as birth dates, in citizenship papers. The location of these papers depends on which court naturalized the individual. If the certificate of naturalization, thought by many to be the "citizenship papers," is in the family’s possession, it will show the county, state, or federal court in which the citizen was naturalized. Contact the court to learn the current location of the records.

Another way to determine the court of naturalization is through voter registration records. Immigrants had to prove their citizenship, and these records often indicate the court where naturalized. Contact the board of elections where the immigrant lived to determine if the records still exist. Otherwise, the long (six months to one year) route must be taken: contact the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, Washington, DC 20530. Some naturalization records have been microfilmed by the Family History Library.

Town Societies
Jewish immigrants formed societies based on their towns of origin; these were called landsmanshaftn societies. Membership in such a group invariably means that the person came from the town or a neighboring town. One function of these groups was to buy land in a Jewish cemetery. Even if it cannot be determined that an ancestor was a member of a landsmanshaftn society, burial in a plot owned by such a group implies that the ancestor came from that town. (The burial societies also sold burial plots to outsiders, however, so such evidence is not conclusive.) The archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 15 W. 16th St., New York, NY 10011 [new address], has a large number of records of these societies. The institute has published its holdings in A Guide to YIVO’s Landsmanshaftn Archive (New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, n.d.).

Pre-Holocaust Period (1924-44)
Because this period is contemporary, a principal source of information is the individuals themselves or their children. A wealth of twentieth-century documentation on Americans described elsewhere in this book can be used as well.

Holocaust Survivors (1945-60)
Friends and neighbors of Holocaust victims can often provide valuable information. The National Registry of Jewish Holocaust Survivors contains the names of some 80,000 survivors and their families living in the United States and Canada. The book is available in many Holocaust centers and major libraries. The organization that created the registry will forward letters to survivors. Write to the American Gathering/Federation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, 122 W. 30th St., New York, NY 10001.

Note
1. Since the publishing of The Source this has been questioned. Bremen lists were systematically destroyed by the port authorities as it was deemed the lists no longer had value. As a consequence only lists starting in the 1920s have survived and they are unindexed.

Gary Mokotoff is a leader in the field of Jewish-American genealogy. He is publisher of Avotaynu, a magazine of Jewish genealogy; past president of the Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies, and is on the board of directors of JewishGen. He is author of a number of books, including the award-winning Where Once We Walked: A Guide to the Jewish Communities Destroyed in the Holocaust, a gazetteer of Central and Eastern European communities, and How to Document Victims and Locate Survivors of the Holocaust. Mokotoff is also known for his application of computer technology to Jewish genealogy—endeavors which include his co-authorship of the Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex code, the Consolidated Jewish Surname Index, the Jewish Genealogical Family Finder, and the Jewish Genealogical People Finder. He is currently on the board of directors of the Federation of Genealogical Societies and is a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists and Genealogical Speakers Guild.