Jewish Heritage Month

All Jews originate from Judea (modern day Israel), but due to imperialism and colonization of our homeland Judea, most Jews were exiled to the diaspora. Ashkenazi Jews, were brought to Europe via Roman Slave ships, while Mizrahi dispersed nearby in the Middle East, living in dhimmitude. Sephardim were further exiled from Spain to Morocco and the US and other countries. There are many other communities around the world as well. 

The first Jews on American soil were, for the most part, Sephardim, descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had been expelled from the Iberian peninsula when they refused to convert to Christianity. Sephardim shaped the character of early American Jewish life, and also set its religious tone, according to their traditional fites and practices. This first period in American Jewish history, stretching all the way to the early nineteenth century, is thus frequently known :·as the "Sephardic Period" -the era of Spanish- ;'Jewish hegemony.

Between 1820 and 1880, America’s Jewish population ballooned from 3,000 to 250,000, a rate of growth 15 times greater than that of the U.S. as a whole. An estimated 150,000 Jews emigrated to America during these years, the overwhelming majority young German-speaking Central European Jews from Bavaria, Western Prussia, Posen and Alsace. Jews faced severe restrictions on where they could live, what kind of work they could pursue, how they practiced Judaism and even, in some cases, whether they could marry.  For them, America represented both economic opportunity and religious freedom.  

The unification of Germany in 1871 diminished German-Jewish immigration to the United States, but at that very time East European Jewish immigration to America’s shores began to increase. Violent attacks (known as pogroms) led many to risk life and fortune in the new world, but the root causes of the mass migration lay deeper — in overpopulation, oppressive legislation, economic dislocation, forced conscription, wretched poverty and crushing despair, coupled with tales of wondrous opportunity in America and offers of cut-rate steerage travel.  Between 1880 and the onset of restrictive immigration quotas in 1924, well over two million Jews from Russia, Austria-Hungary and Romania settled in the United States.  

During the Cold War Russian Jews sought refuge in Israel and in diaspora community around the world including America. Soviet Jewish immigration to the United States occurred primarily in waves starting in the 1960s, with a significant increase in the 1970s and a peak in 1990. By 2005, over 500,000 Soviet Jews had emigrated to the U.S., and today, there are about 750,000 Russian-speaking Jewish citizens in America, according to The Jewish Federations of North America. 

During the revoution Jewish Persian Immigrants sought asylum in the US. Many in America.  Following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, tens of thousands of Iranian Jews, also known as Persian Jews, immigrated to the United States, establishing large communities in cities like Los Angeles, Miami, and New York. This wave of immigration was largely driven by religious persecution, economic hardship, and insecurity following the revolution 

Mizrahi Jewish immigration to the United States, particularly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These immigrants, with diasporic experience  from various Middle Eastern and North African regions, often faced similar challenges to other Jewish immigrant groups, including language barriers and discrimination, but also maintained strong ties to the middle east and Israel where most Mizrahi immigrants and refugees of the nishul sought refuge in their homeland.