In 1903, Samuel Cronig, a 15-year-old Lithuanian yeshivah
student made a choice. The head of the Holy Synod of the Russian
Orthodox Church had come up some years earlier with a plan to
resolve the Jewish question: one-third of the Jews would be
converted by forcibly placing Jewish male children in the army;
one-third would be forced to emigrate; one-third would be helped
to die. Having no taste for either conversion or death, Samuel
Cronig chose to emigrate. But emigration held its own dangers -
and costs. Young Samuel left the yeshivah, got a job, and saved
every kopek he earned to make possible his choice of emigration.
When he was 17, he left the world of his youth, the land his
ancestors had lived in for far more centuries than the Russians
had ruled it. He set out for the new Goldeneh Medinah (golden
land). Arrived in America, he passed through Ellis Island and
into the arms of relatives. (In those years every Jewish
immigrant had relatives in America. The blood ties may have been
tenuous, even nonexiste