Congregation Beth Elohim

Jews had lived for centuries in eastern and central Europe, frequently in the service of Polish nobility who controlled vast estates that stretched across the central plains through to the Ukraine. In the late 1700's, they may have been as much as ten percent of the population in this region. Then, with Austrian and Prussian connivance, Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, planned and executed the three successive partitions of Poland. From 1772 to 1795, they carved up the center of Europe and Poland disappeared off the map of Europe until after the First World War. Each of the annexing nations thus became a host country to large number of Jews. And Russia, the most anti-Semitic of the group, became master of the largest segment of former Polish territory - and a huge number of Jews became unwitting Russian subjects. They were progressively circumscribed in where they could live (in "The Pale") and what they could do. Some scholars have noted that this deliberate institutional discrimination ultimately corrupted the Tsarist bureaucracy. There is a parallel in our own country; the systematic discrimination against blacks ultimately corrupted the legal and civil authorities trying to suppress them.

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