KIEV
JEWISH EMIGRATION SOCIETY:
STATE
ARCHIVE OF THE KIEV REGION (GAKO): FOND F-444
This
article (in Russian) describes the history and factors leading to the mass
emigration of Jews from Russia in the late 1800’s: Pogroms, restrictive
admission to educational institutions, exclusion from participation in local
government, forced return to the Pale of Settlement for the Jews who managed to
escape, secret surveillance, etc.
It includes a report from the Housing Commission (1898) which described
the extreme conditions under which
many Jews from Kremenchug, Elisavetgrad (Kirovograd), and Odessa lived: “…poor shacks of
rotten planks, where two families of 5-6 people each, crammed into one room…[in]Gomel
pits that encompass 120 similar walled cottages, built level with the ground,
in which up to 2,000 people lived. ..We saw in Vilna in cellars ---two floors
below ground level 5000 families…living
in these lairs. In one of them…we saw 20 people, completely unknown to each
other, children, women in rags, hungry men. Total darkness fills this cellar…”
The
Jewish Emigration Society, established in Kiev in 1909 and headed by Dr. M.
Mandelstam and Dr. D.L. Iohelman, was created in order to provide an “orderly
settlement” of Jews. Documents from Fond F-444 are related to this emigration.
The once secret documents were declassified and made available to researchers
in 1991. The documents are all originals and include lists of emigrants and
questionnaires containing twenty-three questions responded to by the emigrants.
For those interested in information about relatives who emigrated to the U.S.
in the late 1800’s the questionnaires include name, age, marital status,
occupation, place of residence and address, spoken language (as well as
language for reading and writing), family members also travelling, and members who
considered emigrating, reasons for leaving, weekly earnings, address of nearest
relatives remaining.
Case
N 140, Opis 1: contains information about the diseases and disabilities that
disallowed the admission of an immigrant to the U.S.
The
documents are in Russian, Hebrew, English, and German.
No comments:
Post a Comment