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Long before Israel became a state, a bold plan aimed to settle thousands of Russian Jews in Galveston, Texas. Assimilation nearly buried the story.

One day in 1895, a British Jewish writer named Israel Zangwill answered a knock on his door. Outside stood a tall, dark-haired Jewish journalist who’d traveled from Vienna. “I am Theodor Herzl,” the stranger announced. “Help me rebuild the Jewish State.”

It also tells the story of Cockerell’s great grandfather David Jochelman, who became disillusioned with the slow pace of founding the Jewish state, and embarked on a plan of his own: bringing thousands and thousands of Russian Jews to a different sort of “Promised Land”: Galveston, Texas, where he eventually helped 10,000 start new lives.
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“Galveston is now a household word and a word of hope throughout the Pale,” declared Jochelman’s partner, Israel Zangwill, in 1907, in one of the many first-person accounts that make up this book. The first Jews set sail from Russia to Galveston in 1907. Even though the trip was longer and more expensive than traveling to New York, Jochelman had so thoroughly persuaded Russian Jews that Galveston was their ideal new home – their Promised Land – that 10,000 Russian Jews eventually made the journey.

https://aish.com/the-other-promised-land-the-forgotten-jewish-exodus-to-texas/