Nearly one third of the Ashkenazi Jewish population from “the Pale of Settlement,” an area encompassing parts of present-day Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, and Lithuania, fled Eastern Europe before the outbreak of the first World War, after nearly a century of segregation and forced assimilation. The assassination of the Russian Tsar in 1881 unleashed a wave of violent attacks, known as pogroms, on the region’s Jewish communities, prompting many to flee. Colored by antisemitism and xenophobia, hunger among Jewish migrants in the U.S. was often dismissed as a byproduct of their “backwards” traditions or a reflection of their racial inferiority.