Scholastic, the school book seller, offers “A True Book: Ellis Island.” Other national publishers print dozens of tomes about this immigration point.

Few, if any, school texts, though, will share the rest of the story: How over 10,000 Russian Jews, fleeing religious pogroms and more, arrived not in New York City, but right here on our island.

Our guide to this is author Rachel Cockerrell.

A personal history expanded

“I have a Jewish lineage,” she told Our Faith. “My grandmother was born in Russia, and she came to London on the eve of the first World War, aged 8, speaking no English. I set out to write a book about her, but quickly became captivated by her father, my great-grandfather. He and others had the motto: ‘If we cannot get the Holy Land, we can make another land holy.’”

It may

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