Visas and Passports for Ksuves: Marriage as a Migration Strategy of Polish Jewish Women in the 1920s

• In Event: East European Jews Navigating Marriage in Migration to the Americas in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

In 1929, two Jewish women planned their emigration from Poland and became the central protagonists of two trafficking scandals widely publicized in the press. First, Miriam Mirska, a twenty-four-year-old single woman from Nieswiez (eastern Poland), applied for a partner visa at the American consulate. Miriam submitted her marriage certificate (ksuve) to support her application and claimed she would join her husband in the United States. Second, Ela L., a twenty-seven-year-old widow with two children from Kielce (Central Poland), embarked in Buenos Aires that year as a newlywed wife of a long-term Jewish resident of Argentina who secured her entry documents. The press painted the stories of both women’s emigration to the Americas as trafficking that was facilitated through a Jewish marriage (shtile huppe). Yet, a careful reading of women’s testimonies and situated within the broader immigration restrictions’ context, these two cases reveal new migration strategies employed by Polish Jewish women in the 1920s.


Using Polish police reports, Yiddish, and Polish-language press accounts from Poland, Argentina, and the United States, this paper analyses these two unrelated cases that happened in 1929 as a window to explore how Polish Jews navigated the new restrictive migratory regimes introduced in the 1920s globally. By looking at Jewish emigration from Poland to the United States and Argentina through the lens of marriage, this paper provides a new understanding of Jewish immigration after the introduction of the quotas. It demonstrates that the new migratory restrictions rendered marriage new meanings for Jewish immigrants, especially women, turning it into a tool to circumvent the restrictions. Yet, as this comparative study of Argentina and the United States reveals, this new migratory strategy was not ideal and sometimes it was at the cost of losing personal freedom and being a victim of sexual exploitation.

Author

• Aleksandra Jakubczak, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews