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While Jews had a largely similar experience to other immigrants at Ellis Island, their community's advocacy on their behalf was unique, says Vincent J. Cannato, the author of what he calls the "first comprehensive narrative history of Ellis Island."

Cannato's "American Passage" -- whose paperback edition came out last week -- features the accounts of immigrants, officials, interpreters, and social reformers of Ellis Island's story, focusing on the period from 1892 to 1924 during which about 12 million immigrants were inspected there.

Deportation and exclusion was damaging for any immigrant, but because many Jewish immigrants were fleeing pogroms, "to be a Jew and be sent back to Russia was extremely bad," Cannato said. Therefore, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), more so than other ethnic immigration agencies, made sure that as many Jews as possible were able to get through Ellis Island.

"All the ethnic and religious groups had [similar] efforts at Ellis Island, but HIAS was clearly the most influential and the most active," Cannato, an associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, said in a phone interview with The Jewish State.

Cannato said that previously, only picture books, children's books, and oral histories tackled the task of compiling the story of Ellis Island. Cannato wrote his book in narrative form, but said he tried to "use those stories to tell a larger issue, a larger story" by using those stories as a launching pad for discussion on issues like intelligence testing and regulation of sexual morality.

For the "lay reader," Cannato said he tried to present information that may not have been apparent before, such as the fact that less than 2 percent of immigrants at Ellis Island were sent back or rejected. For academics, the book tries to put Ellis Island's history in the context of the federal government's takeover of the immigration issue, Cannato said.

In the Jewish arena, besides for exploring the impact of HIAS, "American Passage" examines how Jews at Ellis Island were dubbed with the title of "Hebrew," making them the only religious group to receive a racial classification. That classification was not "nefarious," Cannato said, but rather an "ethnographic" consideration to ease the statistical study of immigrants who had similar backgrounds but different religions. For example, a non-Jewish immigrant from Poland was likely to become a coal miner, but a Jewish immigrant from Poland would probably be a tailor, Cannato explained.

Cannato also writes about how Jewish lawyer Max Kohler challenged Ellis Island's $25 rule, which meant that all immigrants had to have at least that amount of money to enter America.

While most immigrants passed through Ellis Island in just two or three hours, living in tenements on the Lower East Side of Manhattan was a much more formative experience in the lives of Jewish immigrants, Cannato said. However, he said the children and grandchildren of immigrants often attach a greater emotional significance to Ellis Island than their ancestors do because that was where their family first set foot in America, a so-called "promised land."

Overall, the Jewish experience at Ellis Island was similar to that of other groups, Cannato said, because they were subject to the same line of questioning from immigration officials and the same harsh conditions in steerage on the boats that brought them to America.

"It was something that was shared along the way, by Jews and gentiles," Cannato said of the immigrant experience.

For more information on "American Passage", visit http://www.vincentcannato.com/html/home.html.