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Waves of Migration
Jewish immigrants from German-speaking countries began settling in Minnesota as early as the 1850s.
Between 1881 and 1924 more than two million Jews, most from the Russian Empire, left Europe for new homes in the United States, escaping economic hardship and repressive political regimes. Although most Jews settled on the East Coast, a surprising number came to the Upper Midwest. By the 1930s, there were about 50,000 Jews — mostly of Russian origin — living in Minnesota and the Dakotas.
A new wave of Jewish immigration occurred after World War II, when many survivors of Nazi concentration camps sought new lives in the United States.
When the Soviet Union eased emigration restrictions in the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of Jews left for the United States. Several thousand settled in
the Upper Midwest.
top map: The yellow area on the map indicates the limits of the Pale of Settlement, a hundred-mile-wide strip of land on the western edge of Russia that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea, the only area where Jews were allowed to live. Map from They Chose Minnesota, ©1981 Minnesota Historical Society.
inset photo: The Ackos family, born in Greece, arriving in St. Paul, about 1948. After 1945, the Upper Midwest became home to many Holocaust survivors. Courtesy of the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest.
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