12:00 PM
JCC: Noontime Knowledge
Steven Ujifusa
“The Last Ships from Hamburg”
In The Last Ships from Hamburg, Steven Ujifusa tells the story of the second Exodus that, between 1881 and 1914, brought two and a half million Russian and Central European Jews to the United States. This mass migration was precipitated by outbursts of antisemitic violence following the 1881 assassination of Russia’s Czar Alexander II. The Jews became the scapegoat, as they had been so many times before. Risking all they’d ever known, they illegally escaped from Russia by train, heading to Hamburg, Germany, where they boarded steamships to the shores of the United States. Many were drawn to the US by the “disestablishment” clause of the constitution that allowed freedom of religion, as well as economic and educational opportunities and the possibility of owning land. Their hazardous passage was made possible by the coordinated efforts of two Jewish men: one in Germany, Albert Ballin, and the other in the United States, Jacob Schiff. Ballin was a visionary. As managing director of the Hamburg-America shipping line, he worked hard to retrofit existing ships and build new ones — all of which helped tremendous numbers of Jews set sail for America. Schiff, the philanthropist and managing partner of the banking firm Kuhn, Loeb and Co., was likewise devoted to rescuing Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe and bringing them to the United States.