Tuesday, February 08, 2011
Russia's Pale of Settlement and Jewish Goldfoot Family
Between 1835 and 1917 the Pale was made up of the areas of Kovno, Suwalki (where my grandmother was from) Vilna (possibly Goldfoot came from here) Grodno, Lomza, Plock, Kausz, Warsaw, Piotrkow, Kielce, Radom, Lublin, Syedlitz, Vitebsk, Mogilev, Minsk, Volhynia, Podolia, Kiev, Chernigov, Poltava, Ekaterinoslav, Kherson, Bessarabia, and possibly Taurida.
Jews had been confined to this area by laws passed in 1795 and 1815. By 1885 there were over 4 million Jews living in the Pale. No wonder my grandfather left. If Jews wanted to live in Nikolsev in Kherson, or Kiev in the area of Kiev, or Yalta and Sebastopol, they had to have special residence permits as those towns were barred to Jews.
By 1882, 500,000 Jews who had been living in rural areas of the Pale, which my Jermulowske grandmother's parents may have, were forced to leave their homes and live in towns or shtetls in the Pale. 250,000 Jews living along the western frontier of Russia were also moved into the Pale. 700,000 Jews living east of the Pale were driven into the Pale by 1891.
In 1880, the town of Brody, which lie in the Austria-Hungary section on the boarder of the Pale, was the main town where over 2 million Jews living in the Pale began their emmigration to the USA, Britain, Europe, South America and Palestine. It was like a port only wasn't on water. Both Goldfoot and Jermulowske would have had to travel south to reach this port. In 1891, 2,000 Jews were deported, many of them in chains, from Vitebsk, which was the area next door to Vilna. This also could have been a cause to get my grandfather and others to leave "Russia.
Poland had had its first partition in 1772 and Russia tried many times to ban Jews from living there. Then Poland was divided by Russia, Germany and Austria, and Russia gained Poland and Lithuania, White Russia, the Ukraine and some of Galicia. This added hundreds of thousands of Jews to Russia's population.
Since Jews were a bane to the Russians, their laws of 1795 and 1835 had a limit of Jews to newly annexed areas which became the Pale of Settlement. The governments of Vitebsk, Mogilev, Chernigov, Poltava, Ekaterinoslav, Taurida, Kherson, Kiev, Minsk, Podolia, Bessarabia, Volhynia, Vilna, Kovno, Suwalki, Grodno, Lublin, Syedlitz, Lomza, Plock, Warsaw, Kalisz, Piotrkow and Kielce made up the Pale of Settlement governments with the last 10 being part of Poland.
Nathan was born at the worst period in Russian history. The 1880's was another dark period of rising anti-Semitism, expulsions from large cities and many other general restrictions. It was mandatory for Jews "to keep the same names that had been entered in the vital records." 1881 saw Alexander II assassinated causing antisemitism. Jews were traders and artisans since Middle Ages and were now restricted in Russia including much of Poland in Pale of Jewish Settlement. Serfdom was in Russia until 1861. In 1891 22,000 Jews in chains were led from Moscow and St. Petersburg to the Pale. It was hard to leave Russia. They had to cross borders illegally into Austria/Hungary, then to Vienna or Berlin. In Hamberg, Bremen and Rotterdam, thousands tried to find passage to America, standing in long lines. Then they crowded into steerage for 2 to 4 weeks of seasickness and hundreds sharing a toilet. In 1904 20,000 people did not pass the inspection and were sent back to Europe. Between 1881 and 1910 1.5 million Jews emmigrated to USA. Of that 1 million were from Russia. Most Eastern European immigrants destined for Oregon stopped on the Lower East Side of New York before traveling by train across the country to Portland. Others came more directly because relatives or families had already settled here.
Resource: Finding Our Fathers-a guidebook to Jewish genealogy by Dan Rottenberg.
My notes -last paragraphLabels: Goldfoot, Jermulowske, Pale of Settlement, towns in Pale
