Galveston Movement

The Galveston Movement, also known as the Galveston Plan, was one immigration assistance program operated by several Jewish organizations between 1907 and 1914. The program worked to divert Jewish immigrants, fleeing Russia and eastern Europe, away from East Coast cities, particularly New York, which was already crowded with these poverty-stricken immigrants. During its operation, ten thousand Jewish immigrants passed through Galveston, Texas, about a third the number that emigrated to Palestine during the same period. New York financier and philanthropist Jacob Schiff was the driving force behind the effort, which he supported with nearly $500,000 of his personal fortune. B'nai Israel's Rabbi Henry Cohen was the humanitarian face of the movement, meeting ships at the Galveston docks and helping guide the immigrants through the cumbersome arrival and distribution process, and on into the countryside.

Increased antisemitic pogroms in Tsarist Russia, starting in the early 1880s, led to a tidal wave of Jewish immigration to the United States. The established Jewish elite in America had long sought to increase US government diplomatic involvement to help alleviate similar occurrences for their co-religionists in Europe, and strongly supported continued open immigration generally, as a way to accomplish this. Four times between 1896 and 1906 they registered their objections to immigration restrictions when these were debated in Congress, but crowded conditions and rampant poverty in these neighborhoods were well documented. The Jewish Immigrants' Information Bureau, based in Galveston, directed the movement as a means of preventing an anticipated wave of anti-Semitism on the Eastern seaboard, which might lead to immigration restrictions. It therefore sought to find suitable alternative destinations for the influx of immigrants.

Among the cities considered were Charleston, South Carolina, New Orleans, and Galveston, Texas. Charleston, despite its long-established Jewish community, explicitly wanted Anglo-Saxon immigrants, and New Orleans, a thriving urban center where Jews might be inclined to settle instead of moving on into the interior, was also threatened by outbreaks of yellow fever.

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