User:SarahKBW/sandbox

Sub-heading
This is a regular sentence.

Here is a link to High School Musical.

Sometimes things can be in bold, or they can be italic.

Many Russian Jewish refugees that fled Tsarist Russia to Switzerland found that their presence was not accepted by the Swiss. Even Swiss Jews found the culture of Russian Jews to be too different from their own to empathize with even with a shared religion.

The 1948 war and conflict between Arabs and Zionists was followed by the establishment of the state of Israel.

Russian Diaspora Article notes
Jewish Russians that emigrated from Russia in the 19th century. 2.5 million Jews immigrated primarily from Tsarist Russia after 1880 alone but the waves of Jewish migration west were prominent from the 1820s to 1920s. In just 11 years of that time leading up to 1910, one-seventh of the Jews in Russia emigrated. Because Jewish immigrants were a notable group that had great influence in their leaving and in the places they settled, this seems like a relevant section for this article. Young men in particular, both Jewish and not, left Russia to escape conscription into the Russian army. Under the “Americas” subhead I would like to add a little more context around Russian Jewish immigration, just to state the pull factors that the United States specifically held for Jewish Russians. Roughly 80 percent of the Jews that immigrated from eastern Europe (⅓ of the total Jews in Eastern Europe) in the late 1800s went to the U.S. where their Russian and Jewish identity was challenged.

One prominent group that emigrated out of Russia was the Jewish people whose waves of mass migration west spanned roughly a century from the 1820s to the 1920s and totaled around 2.5 million people. In the eleven years leading up to 1910, one of every seven Jews in Russia had left the country. Jews in particular were threatened in Russia at this time by widespread intolerance and subsequent pogroms and threatened violence against them. Many Jews in Russia and other Eastern European countries decided that emigrating to Europe and the Americas where tolerance of Jews was growing or already established was necessary for their own safety.

The Russo-Japanese War, World War I, and the Russian Revolution that became a civil war happened in quick succession with some overlap and heightened the strain on Russia and particularly the men expected to participate in military service. A major reason for young men specifically to emigrate out of Russia was to avoid forced service in the Russian army.

In the late 1800's there was a large influx of Jewish immigrants to the United States from Russia and Eastern Europe. From the third of the Jewish population that left the area, roughly eighty percent resettled in America. There, many still desired to hold onto their Russian identities and settled in areas with large amounts of Russian immigrants already. Local populations were generally distrustful of their cultural differences.

Jews in the zone libre
Jews in the southern zone of France were directly targeted by French anti-Semitic legislation from the Vichy government. Though the free zone was not under direct Nazi control from 1940 to1942, many of the laws made in these years mirrored the policies of Nazi Germany and German-occupied northern France despite their completely French origin.

Vichy anti-Jewish legislation was made and enforced by the Vichy government who had administrative and military control in the zone libre, as opposed to the Northern Zone where Germany had complete military control. The set of laws called the Jewish Statute (Statute des Juifs) began in October of 1940, just three months after the zone libre was formed. These laws barred the Jews of France from many aspects of daily life including work and naturalization as French citizens. Three quarters of Jews in France who lost their jobs from this statute were from the southern zone. Jews new classification as foreign made them more at risk for harsh punishment as “foreigners” rather than citizens. House-arrest or being arrested and placed into one of the internment camps in France was a common fate. Breaking any French law or anti-Jewish statute could lead to their expulsion if accused by a neighbor or officer. Jews continued to be stripped of their rights in Southern France and forced out of French society over the two years of the zone libre.

Official justification for the laws varied slightly but held with the top-down anti-Semitism characteristic of the Vichy government at this time. The General Commission on Jewish Affairs stated plainly that these laws were justified in their moral humiliation of Jews and were completely of French origin. The narrative of Jews in France being parasitic was pushed by Vichy French pushed in official statements but was relatively subdued until the last six months of the zone libre when outright antisemitism became a fundamental aspect of Vichy policy.