Belarusian Americans
| Total population | |
|---|---|
|
750,000 |
|
| Regions with significant populations | |
| New York, New Jersey, Cleveland, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit | |
| Languages | |
| Belarusian, Russian, American English | |
| Religion | |
| Predominantly Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, Judaism | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Russian Americans, Ukrainian Americans, Rusyn Americans, other Slavic Americans |
750,000
- 800,000
Belarusian Americans (Belarusian: Беларускія амэрыканцы, Biełaruskija amerykancy; Russian: Белорусские американцы, Byelorusskiye amerikantsy), also known by the somewhat dated terms Byelorussian Americans, Whiteruthenian Americans and White-Russian Americans, are Americans who are of total or partial Belarusian ancestry.
There is a suggestion that the first Belarusian immigrants to the United States, settling there in the early 17th century in Virginia, could have been brought by Captain John Smith, who visited Belarus in 1603. The first wave of mass emigration from Belarus started in the final decades of the nineteenth century and continued until World War I. They emigrated to the United States via Libava and northern Germany. When they arrived, most settled in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore. However, most of these first Belarusians were registered either as Russians (those who were Orthodox Christians) or as Poles (Roman Catholics). Most Belarusians who immigrated to the United States after World War I were political immigrants, mainly from western Europe and Poland. There were only several thousands of them. Very few Belarusians, mostly from Jewish-Belarusian families, came to the USA between the late 1930s and the end of 1941.
In the post-World War II period, from 1948 to the early 1950s about 50,000 Belarusians immigrated to the United States; most of them left Europe for political reasons. These immigrants were former prisoners of war from the Polish and Soviet armies, persons who had worked in Germany as Ostarbeiters during the World War II, former émigrés who left Belarus shortly after the war or in 1939 when the Soviets attacked Poland, refugees who had fled Belarus in 1943 or 1944, and defectors and dissidents after World War II. They came from many countries where they had settled after World War II. The majority of them came from West Germany and Austria. Many Belarusians who came from Great Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, Denmark, and other countries in South America and North Africa.
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Wikipedia