Fifteen-year-old Abraham Bisno recalled running for his life. “I hid myself in a clay hole in an old brickyard on a hillside,” he remembered. “I witnessed the mob coming down the hill to assault the Jewish settlement. I saw children and old people beaten—buildings burned—I heard women screaming.”

Violent pogroms—deadly riots against Jews—erupted in Russia in 1881 in the wake of the assassination of Czar Alexander II. The city of Kiev, where Abraham Bisno lived with his parents, became the scene of a pogrom in late April. “For days on end,” Bisno wrote, “entire neighborhoods were looted and largely destroyed by crowds estimated at over four thousand.” Fanatical priests fed anti-Semitism (hatred of Jews) by denouncing the Jews as heartless “Christ-killers” who used the blood of Christian children in their rituals. The government failed to move quickly to put down the violence.

Bands of Russians swarmed through the Jewish quarters, breaking down doors and smashing windows, looting or destroying all the furnishings. They ripped to shreds feather beds and feather pillows, sending the white down into the breeze until it settled like snow over the scenes of violence and mayhem. No one knows precisely how many Jews died at the hands of the mob, but estimates range as high as five hundred. “The building we lived in and the place we worked in were assaulted at the same time,” Bisno recalled. “Mother ran for her life while we struggled for ours; we were all separated by the mob—the shop was destroyed, the goods carried away.”

These and subsequent pogroms and persecutions prompted a great wave of Jewish migration. Between 1880 and 1914, more than 2.7 million Jews sought refuge from religious persecution, the vast majority of them heading to the United States. Among the first to emigrate were Abraham Bisno and his family. When the Bisnos learned that Jewish groups in Europe and America had raised money to help Russian Jews emigrate, they scraped together forty rubles to get from Kiev to Brody in Galicia, where the refugees gathered. “Our family sold a sewing machine and whatever clothing could be spared—some from our very backs.” In Brody, they had to wait six weeks, begging for bread on the streets, before they received aid to pay for their passage overland to Hamburg and from there to Liverpool and on to the United States.

The trip was long and arduous, particularly the ocean voyage. Crowded in steerage, immigrants suffered seasickness during the crossing, which took two to three weeks by steamer. Once in the United States, the Bisno family was sent on to Atlanta by an American committee formed to help the immigrants. The men quickly found work as tailors. Bisno struck out on his own, moving to Chattanooga, where he apprenticed to an English-speaking tailor and quickly picked up the language by reading signs and advertisements. But the Bisnos were unhappy in the South. Abraham’s mother complained that she could not find a butcher who sold kosher meat, and his father fretted that there was no Orthodox synagogue in the neighborhood. So after nine months, the family moved to a larger Jewish community in Chicago.

The slums of the nation’s big cities, where many of the Jewish immigrants ended up, were far from a “promised land.” The Bisnos lived in a dilapidated shack above a stable with a yard “full of rags, junk, rats, and vermin.” Other Jewish immigrants voiced their disappointment at the conditions they encountered in the United States. “The dirt, the noise, the confusion, the swarming hurrying crowds!” Goldie Stone exclaimed. “My heart sank. This was all so different from what I had expected or dreamed.”

Bad as conditions were, the immigrant Jews appreciated the safe haven the United States afforded. And although the sweatshops where Bisno and other Jewish immigrants labored were dark and bleak, for most Jews the slums proved a temporary prison. The United States provided not only a refuge but also a chance to start over and prosper. Bisno watched as many of his friends and relatives, after saving or borrowing a little money, opened small businesses of their own. “All had to begin in a very small way,” he recalled. “With a hundred or two hundred dollars they were able to start grocery stores, markets, cigar stores.” Bisno quickly moved up in his trade, becoming a contractor in a sweatshop by the time he reached the age of sixteen. But then his life took a different course. Moved by the Haymarket martyrs, he converted to socialism in 1886, joined the Knights of Labor, and went on to become a labor organizer. The first president of the Chicago Cloak Makers’ Union, he worked to improve the lot of garment workers until his death in 1929.

Questions for Consideration

Connect to the Big Idea

What developments in technology and industry encouraged global immigration during the Gilded Age?