German Jews in America

In NYC, the first stop for Jewish immigrants was the Lower East Side or Alphabet City. By the influx of Jews in the 1880s, the previous generation had started assimilating and you'd see them all over, especially the Upper West Side, which was the "historic" home for Sepharim (from the early "New Amsterdam" days) and the more-assimilated Jews from Western Europe. That transition from Lower East Side to Upper West Side was kind of the "American immigrant" story in a nutshell: Arrive as a greenhorn peddler, make your way, learn the customs, send your kids to school, become a success, assimilate, move away from the other immigrants, become an official American.

Good to know! And then of course there's the journey of the Goldbergs out to Connecticut after that.

It's been suggested in the thread that German Jews wouldn't be welcomed by the Eastern European Jews who were currently in the Lower East Side at the time. I'm wondering the extent to which that might be true. New York has certainly had plenty examples of ethnic groups with more differences than German/East European Jews living in close quarters.

While it's possible these newcomers, as more sophisticated urbanites, might move straight on to the posher neighborhoods, what's the likelihood Germany let's them leave with a significant amount of wealth? True, there are plenty of tales of smuggling prized possessions even into the camps, so a pass through customs won't catch everything. But enough for most of them to move immediately into the middle class? And with uncertain language skills? The assimilating cohort living in the Upper West Side is more likely to reject (and do so successfully) the new arrivals than those on the Lower East Side.
 
Top