Russian Pogroms

During the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, Jews who were living in the Russian Empire went through a lot of persecution, and faced what are called pogroms. Pogroms are essentially an order or demand to persecute or exterminate a specific ethnic group, and in this case these pogroms were aimed at Jews.

In looking up the definition, the word pogrom is Yiddish meaning “destruction”; “po- like + grom thunder”. Pogrom comes from the Russian word pogromu.

These pogroms repeatedly took place in locations like Odessa, and what we know today as Poland and the Ukraine.

In consequence of the pogroms, there were many Jews who fled to Great Britain and the United States between 1880 and 1914.

Significance in family history

In the early 1880’s, 1881 through 1884 specifically, a pogrom occurred when Tsar Alexander II was assassinated. And of course, the first group that was convenient to point figures at were the Jews. The Jews were conveniently accused of assassinating Alexander II, even though their accusers had no evidence to prove this, but it served as an excuse to attack Jewish residences anyway. Anarchists rose up against the Jewish communities, and destroyed the homes of Jewish families, and many of them had to suffer through poverty.

With how my third great-grandparents fit into this picture, I had to check census records. The 1900 census indicates that my great-great-great grandfather, Samuel Glasser, came to the United States as early as 1885 and as late as 1887, according to the 1920 census. My third great-grandmother, Sarah Miller, immigrated to the United States in 1887. At this point, is undetermined whether Samuel and Sarah traveled to the United States in the same passenger vessel. I believe they came to the United States on separate ships. And it seems like they immigrated to the United States for the same reason: to escape religious persecutions and the pogroms in the Russian Empire.

There is still a lot of research and analyses to make concerning the evidences at hand, but this is what I have come to thus far.