My relatives didn’t arrive in the U.S. during the period of mass immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe from 1880-1920, when over 20 million people, including two and a half million Eastern European Jews, arrived on these shores. As the doors of immigration to the U.S. began closing after 1920, my grandfather’s entire family–his parents, brother and four sisters–lived in Zambrow, Poland. In this post, I reconstruct, based on oral histories, family documents and genealogical research, the story of how my grandfather, my Zaide, Yosef Wierzbowicz/Waxman, managed to immigrate to and settle in the U.S. (In later posts, I will recount how two of his siblings as well as his father made it to America before the war. Everyone else was killed.)

One central reality governed the actions of my relatives as they tried to get out of Poland: U.S. immigration laws.

It is remarkable to consider that for more than its first hundred years, the U.S. had not a single law governing immigration. No federal agency dealing with immigration existed. No visa was needed–indeed, the very concept of a visa was unknown. Coming to live in this country was as easy  as buying a ticket and boarding a ship bound to this country.

That open door, symbolized by the Statue of Liberty and Emma Lazarus’ words engraved on it (“give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. . .”), began slowly closing in 1882 and, by 1924, it had been essentially shut. The nativist campaign to restrict immigration began when, in 1882, Congress passed a law targeting an entire group of people for exclusion: the Chinese. The Chinese Exclusion Act barred Chinese laborers from entering the U.S. for 10 years. (The exclusion was subsequently and repeatedly extended). That same year, it passed another law that prevented the entry of “any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge” (or LPC for short).

Yet to most potential immigrants, the LPC provision meant little. No guidelines on what constituted a “public charge” existed nor was there any government agency to enforce it. In addition, 1881 to 1920 were years of rapid industrialization, and business owners needed a growing supply of cheap labor. Anyone who appeared able and willing to work was considered eligible to immigrate.

The seeds for restricting immigration from Europe were planted in 1907 when Congress created the Dillingham Commission, a panel charged with investigating the “consequences” of immigration. It was supposedly a “fact finding” commission, but its true purpose was to provide justifications for restricting immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, mainly Russia, Poland, and Italy. Its 41-volume report, published in 1911, drew a distinction between the “old” immigration from Western Europe prior to 1890 (mostly from Britain, Germany and Scandinavia) and these “new” immigrants (Benton-Cohen, The Dillingham Commission: Inventing the Immigration Problem, p. 6). These “new” immigrants, the report concluded were “inferior in education, ability, and genetic makeup to most of those who had come previously” and therefore their numbers needed to be greatly reduced. (Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, 45).

Congress relied on this rationale to pass the Emergency Act of 1921, which, for the first time, established national immigration quotas. The quotas were based on the number of foreign-born residents of each nationality living in the United States as per the 1910 census. The law specified that only 3% of the number of those nationalities living in the U.S. as of 1910 would be allowed to immigrate.  The law effectively limited nations in these regions to about 175,000 individuals.

The 1921 law was a temporary measure to deal with the perceived “emergency” posed by immigration. The law was replaced in 1924 by the Johnson-Reed Act, which imposed new quotas that further reduced the number of immigrants from Southern and Eastern European eligible to immigrate. (It also effectively banned all immigration from Asia.) The law reduced the quota from 3% to 2%. It also changed the reference census to 1890. Since few people from Eastern and Southern European had immigrated to the U.S. before 1890, the law effectively precluded mass migration from these areas. For example, while an average of 210,000 Italians immigrated per year from 1901 to 1914, under the 1924 quota, only about 4,000 Italians per year were allowable since the 1890 quota counted only 182,580 Italians in the U.S. 

If this were not enough, the law also established the “consular control system” of immigration, which divided responsibility for immigration between the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. It mandated that no person should be allowed to enter the United States without a valid immigration visa issued by an American consular officer abroad. Consular officers were authorized to issue visas to eligible applicants, but the number of visas that could be issued by each consulate annually was limited, and no more than 10% of the quota could be given out in any one month. Thus, for the first time, people were not permitted to board a ship bound for the U.S. without possessing a valid visa.

The law achieved its intended result, reversing three decades of immigration primarily from Eastern and Southern Europe in favor of immigrants from Northern and Western Europe.

My grandfather left Poland in the same year that the Emergency Act was passed. Having been drafted into the Polish Army, he escaped and crossed the Polish border into Germany. After living for about two years in Germany, stateless and illegally, he made his way to Palestine, likely having obtained a forged Jewish Agency immigration certificate.

Arriving in Palestine, my grandfather remained essentially stateless. Technically, he was a citizen of the new nation of Poland, yet without a passport or any official papers to prove it, and, as an escapee from its army, not able to return to Poland even if he wanted. While he was also a resident of Palestine (even though he may not have entered Palestine legally), Palestine did not exist as an independent state. As of July 24, 1922, the League of Nations had recognized Palestine as a British Mandate. However, the exact nationality of its residents, Jews and Arabs alike, was ambiguous. Those who had lived in the area before the mandate took effect were ex-citizens of the former Ottoman Empire which had ruled the area prior to World War I.  They had lost their Ottoman status without gaining any new nationality.

To clarify the nationality of Palestinian residents, the British, on September 1922, passed a law that provided that a person who was “habitually resident in Palestine on that date, might within two months apply for Palestinian Citizenship.” My maternal grandmother’s father, Tzvi Dov Golomborsky, was eligible for such citizenship, having lived with his family in Palestine since 1906 upon his emigration from Shereshov, in Belarus.

He immediately seized the opportunity and obtained a document attesting to his Palestinian Citizenship.

Shortly after my grandfather’s arrival in Palestine, the British revised its policy on Palestinian citizenship, requiring residents to show that they had resided in Palestine for two years, were of good character, had knowledge of either English, Arabic or Hebrew and intended to reside in Palestine.

Upon arriving in Palestine, my grandfather found work as a  laborer. Eventually he was employed by Tzvi Dov Golomborsky, a well-known contractor in Tel Aviv, through whom he met his daughter, Chaya.

However, he did not intend to make Palestine his home. His ultimate goal was to immigrate to the United States.

In 1925, he left Palestine and went to Paris. He apparently believed that his best chance of obtaining a visa for the U.S. was from the U.S. consulate in Paris. Perhaps he had heard that the consulate in Paris had not issued its quota of U.S. visas or were more liberal in granting visas than at other American consulates in Europe. That effort failed. He returned to Palestine, and, in September, 1925, married my grandmother.

At some point, after he had lived in Palestine for two years (presumably before he left for Paris), he applied for and was granted Palestinian citizenship. My grandparents’ names appear on the 1926 list of voters eligible to vote in the Tel Aviv local elections.

Despite his marriage and Palestinian citizenship, my grandfather persisted in his efforts to make the U.S. his home. Instead of trying to obtain a visa from American officials, he turned to the British officials in Palestine.

With its mandate to govern Palestine, the British had to figure out a system for regulating the travel of its residents to and from Palestine. They therefore began issuing passports and other travel documents. In order to leave Palestine, a resident had to obtain a permit, issued at the discretion of the Department of Immigration and Travel or from the police office of the district in which the person resided. This permit, one source explains, “was considered valid only for the journey for which it was issued. In order, apparently, to be applicable to all residents of the country (natives, migrants, stateless persons, refugees) the Passport Regulations employed the term ‘inhabitant of Palestine’ rather than ‘Palestinian citizen.’”

Working through the British authorities, my grandfather was able to obtain an “Emergency Certificate” to leave Palestine for the United States. The certificate, dated March 3, 1927, authorized him to leave Palestine “for a single journey in the United States of America within three months.”

The exact legal nature of this certificate is unclear. It was not a visa to immigrate to the United States. It did entitle him, however, as a resident of a British Mandate, to enter the U.S. legally, if not to immigrate there. He was traveling to the U.S. not as an Eastern European Jew, subject to the strict U.S. quota laws, but rather as a resident of Palestine.

The decision to leave must have been excruciating. The certificate allowed only him–not his wife–to enter the United States. Moreover, his exit paper from Palestine specified that “this certificate is not valid for return to Palestine.” Once again, he would be stateless. Not only that, his newlywed was pregnant with their first child. He therefore risked the possibility that not only would be unable to return to Palestine, but that he would also be unable to obtain papers for his wife and unborn child to join him in the United States.

Since the certificate was valid for only three months, he little time to decide. He wasted no time. He booked passage for the U.S. on a newly built Italian ocean liner, the SS Roma. By March 30, 1927, he had arrived at the port of Providence, Rhode Island.

He lived and worked as a peddler on the Lower East Side. But his main priority must have been figuring out how to get his wife and newborn daughter to the United States. Under U.S. law (then as well as now), an immigrant must be a resident of the U.S. for five years before applying for citizenship, and so he could not get a visa for his wife and daughter under “family reunification.” He tried for over a year, working with the help of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). Finally, he somehow managed to get his wife and daughter papers to travel to the United States. Again, it helped that they were coming to this country outside of the quota system, that is, not as Eastern Europeans, but as residents and citizens of Palestine.

After being separated for over a year-and-a-half, he was reunited with his wife and first laid eyes on his young daughter, Sara, after they arrived in Boston on December 14, 1928.

As mentioned, an immigrant has to reside in the U.S. for five years in order to become a U.S. citizen. My grandfather apparently waited for the five years to elapse after his wife and daughter’s arrival, presumably so that they too could be granted citizenship. Again, he wasted no time. Less than two weeks after the five-year period had ended, he appeared in the federal district court in Brooklyn to file a Certificate of Arrival, a document required as a precondition of applying for citizenship which attests that an immigrant has fulfilled the five-year residency requirement. On the same document, in accordance with U.S. law, he renounced his allegiance to his native land of Poland and/or Russia (Poland was under Russian rule at the time of his birth).

A week later, on January 2, 1934, he appeared in the Southern District for the State of New York to file his Declaration of Intention to become a U.S. citizen as well as his Petition for Citizenship. He swore to “support and defend” this country’s constitution and laws. He brought with him two witnesses, Nathan David Cohen and Joseph Krolowitz, identified as a “pocket book operator” and a “fur operator” respectively, who swore to his good character. He also took one more step: he petitioned that he admitted as a citizen under the name of Joseph Waxman.

 

Soon thereafter, he raised his hand and swore an oath of allegiance to this country and was obtained his Certificate of Naturalization. (I have not yet been able to locate this document.)

The story of my grandfather’s journey from Poland to Palestine to America could end here. But it doesn’t. For my grandmother, who had been raised in Palestine, didn’t like living in the tenements of the Lower East Side. She wanted to live in Palestine.

By the time my grandfather obtained his citizenship, my grandparents had had two more children, my aunt Tzvia (Sylvia) and my mother Yael (Hilda). They were automatically American citizens of the United States, having been born in the U.S. Their older sister Sara, being under 18, became a citizen automatically upon her father gaining citizenship. Now that they were U.S. citizens, they could travel from and, if necessary, return to, the United States. And so, in 1935, the family returned to Palestine, sailing on the same ship, the SS Roma, that had first brought my grandfather to America.

But events were to conspire to make that stay a brief one. My grandfather had taken over his truck, but the British refused to grant him a license to drive it. The Arab riots broke out in 1936, during which my grandfather had to fight off an Arab man who attacked his wife. Then there was the growing anti-Semitism in Poland. My grandfather was committed to getting his family out of Poland. He tried unsuccessfully to get immigration certificates for them to immigrate to Palestine. Since the British had severely restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine, he concluded that he had a better chance of getting them permission to immigrate to the U.S. than to Palestine.

Finally, my grandfather feared the loss of his prized possession: his American citizenship. Under U.S. law as it then existed, a naturalized citizen could lose his or her citizenship if he or she resided “for two years in one’s foreign state of origin or five years in any other foreign state.” (This law was repealed in 1940.) It was unclear whether, under this law, his “foreign state of origin” would be considered Poland or Palestine or whether residing in Palestine was considered living in a “foreign state,” but he was not going to take any chances.

And so, just as he had nearly ten years before, he left his family to sail to the United States. He took with him his eldest daughter, Sara, who was already of school age. This time, however, they traveling as U.S. citizens. They arrived in New York on July 19, 1936.

My grandfather went back to work, earning the money necessary to send for his wife and two other daughters to rejoin him in New York. The separation was not long. Sailing directly from the port of Haifa, my grandmother, aunt and mother arrived in the U.S. on January 17, 1937, once again on the SS Roma.

Looking back, it is difficult to fathom the twists and turns in my grandfather’s journey from 1921, when he first left his native Poland, to 1936, when he permanently settled in the United States. It is a story of struggle and determination, as well as, it seems, some luck. Having reunited with his family, he turned his attention to the two overriding goals that would occupy him for the next three years: making a living and trying, against the overwhelming obstacles placed by U.S. immigration laws, to save the rest of his family in Poland from the dangers he sensed were fast approaching.