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This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute. I call this one, God Bless America.

Leah Balin, her husband Moses, and their eight children, left Western Siberia for Belo Russia in the late 1880s or early 1890s and from

there made their way by foot, rail, and steerage to America in the late summer of

1893.

They were part of a great Jewish exodus,

bringing over one and a half million Russian and European Jews to America

between the 1880s and the first decade of the 20th century.

During these years, anti-Jewish pograms swept across southern and western provinces of the Russian Empire in Eastern Europe.

Pogram is a Russian word, meaning riot, or act of violence or mayhem.

The violence included murders, beatings, rapes, and destruction of property.

The earliest memory of Leah's youngest son Israel was of lying on a blanket by the side of a road watching his family's

house burnt down. The pograms were joined by systematic government

discrimination against Jews. When Leah Bail and her family arrived in New York Harbor on September 14, 1893,

the Statue of Liberty had only been standing there for a few years.

And Emma Lazarus' poem had not yet been cast in bronze and mounted inside the pedestal.

But Leah and her family were certainly among those to whom the poem addressed its familiar welcome.

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