>>>BTW, there are two guys named Dmitry where I am working, only they spell it Dmitriy. Is this a case of some people translating into English one way and some another way?
>>
>>I'm not Dmitry, but thanks to my involvement with Hebrew Free Loan, I see a lot of names of Russian immigrants. A lot of them use "iy" in the transliterations of their names where you or I would have put only "y" or only "i."
>>
>>Tamar
>
>I read a book (can't recall it right now, but it's packed in a box) on jewish immigration to the U.S. and found the timeline and cultural/religious opinions and differences between European Jews and Eastern Europran and Russian Jews very interesting. There were many differences and they found each other as separate and different as they would in a comparison to Irish catholic. I don't know how accurate it was, but it certainly was interesting.

Three major groups of Jews have come to the US. The earliest (including part of my father's family) were Sephardic Jews. The earliest synagogues in the US, including the Touro synagogue in Newport, RI, and Mikveh Israel (still operating) in Philly, were Sephardic. Later in the 19th century, a lot of German Jews came to the US. These were Reform Jews, and they founded the next round of synagogues, which at first were more churchlike. In the 20th century, there was an influx of Eastern European Jews, many of whom came as refugees. The first two groups were more middle and upper class. The last were poor and more religious. Most of the Jews in the US are descended from that last group (again, including me--my father's mother came from the Ukraine).

There was absolutely tension between the German Jews and the later arrivals. The Germans feared that the newly arrived peasants would disrupt the status they'd built for themselves.

Tamar