American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [108]
For Jews who fled anti-Semitic oppression in Europe, protest in America had to be carefully calibrated so as not to stir up ancient hatreds here. However, there was a change in the way American Jewish groups approached immigration. In the 1890s, they had been largely deferential to authorities during the typhus fever and cholera crises. During Williams’s first term at Ellis Island, Jewish groups were cautiously supportive, but not without concerns. By 1909, however, some took a more oppositional approach. To Max Kohler, a lawyer working for the American Jewish Committee, the courts seemed a more appropriate place to challenge immigration law.
The HIAS took on the cases of Hersch Skuratowski and fourteen other Russian Jews detained for possessing less than $25. The organization was unable to prevent the deportation of eleven of them, but did convince Kohler and another lawyer named Abram Elkus to file habeas corpus petitions with U.S. District Court Judge Learned Hand for Skuratowski and the other three—Nechemie Beitz, Meyer Gelvot, and Gershon Farber—who arrived together on the steamship Raglan Castle from Rotterdam.
They argued that the $25 rule had created an extra-legal means of exclusion. “The retroactive character of these regulations makes them all the more unjust and oppressive,” according to the brief. They countered the idea that these men were likely to become public charges. Skuratowki was a butcher by trade, literate, and had a cousin and other family in the country. He left behind his wife and two children in Russia, where he owned his home, as well as a cow and some farming equipment. This was hardly the profile of a pauper. Similar cases were made for the other three men, two tailors and a baker.
The lawyers were not just arguing the merits of these four immigrants; they also set out to attack much of the administrative and legal apparatus for making decisions at Ellis Island. They claimed that the men did not receive due process and were not allowed the benefit of counsel during their hearings. The brief also charged that members of the board of special inquiry were not “free agents,” because they were also subordinates of Williams and felt pressured to carry out his orders. “The officers here are afraid to decide cases on their merits,” Kohler said. It was as if assistant district attorneys were sitting in judgment of cases brought to court by their boss, the district attorney.
There was something else that bothered Kohler and Elkus. Toward the end of their petition, the lawyers included a lengthy section decrying the “unconstitutional classification and discrimination . . . as to his Russian nationality and his Hebrew religion.” Official government documents had referred to Skuratowski as a “Russian Hebrew.” Kohler and Elkus contended that Ellis Island officials “illegally and without authority took into consideration the fact which they spread upon their minutes that applicant is a Russian Hebrew.” They did not accuse Williams and his staff of overt anti-Semitism, but argued that “things foreign to our own conception produce at least a subconscious feeling, and that we may entertain prejudices of which we have no distinct consciousness.” Religious classification by government authorities was unconstitutional and un-American, the lawyers claimed, a situation only made worse by the fact that Judaism was the only religion to be so defined by immigration officials.
The controversy over the classification of immigrants had begun with an 1898 report by then commissioner general of immigration Terence Powderly, Ellis Island assistant commissioner Edward McSweeney, and Victor Safford, a doctor at Ellis Island. Officials had been unhappy that immigrants were being classified solely by country of origin, which meant large multi-ethnic political divisions such as Russia or the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Lost within those groupings were myriad ethnic identities. People coming from