In the years before World War I, 10,000 Jews were sent to Galveston from Russia. The person who sent them there was someone named David Jochelmann.
Now, his great-granddaughter, Rachel Cockerell, has just written a family memoir that tells the story of the plan to create a Jewish homeland in Texas. The book is called “Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land.”
She joined Texas Standard to discuss the book. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This story has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: When Zionists were looking to establish a Jewish national state, Palestine did not seem immediately like a possibility. So they considered creating a temporary homeland in places including Uganda and Australia.
How on earth did thousands of Jews end up coming to Texas in the early 1900s?
Rachel Cockerell: Yeah, as you said, this was sort of a rebellion from the Zionist movement. There was a group of Zionists who thought maybe Palestine is not a possibility right now. Maybe we should find a temporary Jewish refuge somewhere outside of Palestine. And their search really encompassed the whole world.
And Galveston, Texas, was what they sort of landed on. There were these sort of wealthy New York Jews who they collaborated with. And it was this plan to bring 2 million Russian Jews to Texas. And from there, they could spread out across the American hinterland.
New York at that time, we’re talking early 1900s, was the greatest Jewish center in the world. And these American Jews thought, “can’t we bring our fellow Jewish people to America, but to the American hinterland?”
So Galveston was really like a springboard to the rest of America. And a lot of Jews in the middle of America are there because of the Galveston Plan.
Well, and they got there from Galveston, because you write one reason Galveston was chosen was because it seemed like immigrants might not want to settle there.
And indeed, that’s what happened. They did come to Galveston and then sort of spread out. Can you talk about what happened when they arrived and where they went?
Yeah. So Galveston in 1900 – so this is just a few years before the Galveston Plan – as I’m sure many of your listeners will know, was a thriving city, one of the most prosperous cities in the whole of America. It was called the Wall Street of the South.
But then in 1900, I’m really bringing coals to Newcastle here. In England no one knows this, but I’m sure you guys will know Galveston was really flattened by the Galveston hurricane, the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history.
And so Galveston in 1905/1910 was just rebuilding. So yeah, as you said, it was chosen partly because there wouldn’t be this temptation to stay there.
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I want to back up and kind of ask why the Galveston Movement happened in the first place. What was happening in Russia at that time that made this journey so urgent?
There was this sort of creeping spread of anti-Semitism across the Russian Empire, which took the form of pogroms – so Russian gentiles sort of rampaging through the streets and destroying Jewish property and killing or injuring any Jewish person that they found.
The first of this sort wave of pogroms happened in Kishinev. There was a huge outrage, this sort of global outcry. Around 50 people, 50 Jewish people, were killed. And, you know, Theodore Roosevelt said nothing like this can ever happen again. What a terrible atrocity.
And yet the Kishinev pogrom was just the first of hundreds and hundreds of pogroms that happened over the next 10 years. So Jews in the Russian Empire were sort of turning their eyes westward and wondering if America was their homeland, was the promised land.
Well, talk about why the Galveston Movement only lasted a few years. I mean, you mentioned the pressure from the East. Why didn’t it last longer than that?
It was really cut short by World War II. So this project began in 1907 and the plan had been to bring two million Russian Jews to Texas – that really Texas, or Galveston specifically, would become the Ellis Island of the West.
But if you look at the map of the world, you’ll see that a boat going across the Atlantic – not only going to New York, but going that bit further to Texas – was just quite a grueling journey. I think it added another week or two to this already fairly uncomfortable journey. It wasn’t like it was a sort of first class experience.
So it was partly that. It was partly the outbreak of World War I, which halted most transatlantic passenger traffic, and I think you know that’s partly why.
People don’t really know about the Galveston Project today is because it only lasted seven years when it could have lasted decades and decades.
Well, you didn’t know about it. You’re from London. I think it’s fair to say you didn’t have much of a background in Texas. When you started researching your family history, the word “Galveston” came up and you didn’t even know what that was.
What was it like for you? You mentioned visiting Texas for your research. Can you talk about discovering this and anything in particular that stands out about your journey?
Yeah, for a while I was researching my family and this word “Galveston” kept on coming up in my research. And for a while I just ignored it because I thought this is not the story I thought I was telling. I thought was telling a story about my grandmother arriving in London as a child.
But all this stuff about her father and Galveston kept on going up. And finally I sort of gave in and found out that Galveston was not, in fact, a person and was a place. And it kind of felt like it only existed in my head because no one in England had heard of Galveston, the place, let alone the Galveston Project.
It was only when the U.S. borders reopened after 2020 that I finally went to Galveston. And it felt like a kind of pilgrimage.
And I was walking around this place that I had just been obsessed with for years at that point. I was almost walking around with tears in my eyes. It was quite surreal following in the footsteps of this movement, and I know that my great-grandfather had also visited Galveston, so I felt I was following in his footsteps, too.
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Well, your research began before October 7, before the war in Gaza. How are these events connected to the story you tell?
I guess, no matter how you feel about where we are now, I think there’s this sort of duty to be curious about how it started and how we got here – just to really understand and also maybe to see that the founders of Zionism really had no idea what this machine that they were setting in motion was.
In the U.S., immigration is a big focus in the news today. How do you think your story about Jewish immigrants a century ago informs how we might think about current immigration?
What I really noticed while I was writing was that the Jewish immigrants arriving in Galveston were greeted with open arms.
There were very few immigration quotas in America at the beginning of the 20th century. There was really no animosity shown towards them. And they really became Americans. They melted into the melting pot of America.
And part of the sort of fabric of America now is made up of these Galveston immigrants. If you zoom out, the fabric of the United States of America as a whole is so much made up of immigrants.
It’s something that America should see as part of its soul. So that really informs my view of immigration, specifically to America.
