The great wave: two and a half million from the Russian Empire

In forty-three years a third of East European Jewry went to America. After the pogroms of 1881 and the May Laws of 1882, people no longer left one by one but by families and whole towns. Between 1881 and 1924 about two and a half million Jews reached the United States—more than lived in all of Western Europe.

They settled close: by 1910 over half a million people lived on New York's Lower East Side, at a density greater than Bombay's or Calcutta's. They worked in the garment trade: by the 1900s Jews were the majority of workers in the industry that clothed America. From this came the unions—the United Hebrew Trades (1888), the International Ladies' Garment Workers (1900)—and the Yiddish press: Abraham Cahan's Forverts reached a quarter of a million subscribers.

Religiously the wave arrived into a void. Congregations went up fast, there were no rabbis to be had, and the attempt at a chief rabbi of New York failed: Rabbi Jacob Joseph was brought from Vilna in 1888, but not everyone agreed to pay him, his supervision of kashrut turned into a war with the butchers, and he died in 1902 poor and paralysed. More than a hundred thousand came to his funeral, and it ended in a riot: workers at the Hoe factory pelted the procession with iron, and the police beat the mourners. The scandal forced New York to examine, for the first time, how its own police behaved towards Jews.

Yeshivas appeared almost at once: Etz Chaim in 1886, the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary in 1897, out of which Yeshiva University grew.