Galveston Movement

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.

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.

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.

In spite of the devastating 1900 hurricane it was still one of the nation's leading ports, and it was already a destination of the German shipping company Norddeutscher Lloyd, which operated out of Bremen, the major point of European embarkation.

[2] Still, throughout many of the small towns in Texas the courthouse square features stores founded in the early twentieth century by these immigrants who settled and became merchants.