The fusgeyers ( yi, פֿוסגײער, "pedestrian" or "wayfarer"; ro, drumeți or ) were a movement of Romanian Jews who emigrated in an organized manner from Romania from 1900 to 1920. Their name refers to the fact that they were often too poor to even purchase a train ticket to a port city. Roughly 60,000 Jews left the country during that time period, going to Austria and Germany and then onwards via port cities to Canada and the United States. The number of specifically ''fusgeyer'' emigrants may be lower, perhaps a few thousand.

History

The

1866 Constitution of Romania The 1866 Constitution of Romania was the fundamental law that capped a period of nation-building in the Danubian Principalities, which had united in 1859. Drafted in a short time and closely modeled on the 1831 Constitution of Belgium, then consi ...

barred citizenship for non-Christians, meaning that most Jews in the country lived with severely reduced rights. Various attempts at mass Jewish emigration happened between that year and 1900, often in the face of resistance from the Romanian government After a famine in 1899 and outbreaks of antisemitic violence, many young Romanian Jews developed a new practice of emigration: banding into disciplined groups which would share resources and leave the country together. The first such group was created in May 1899 in Bârlad. A man named Ginsburg recruited 94 people who started calling themselves "the Wayfarers from Bârlad". This group was the inspiration for a number of other groups from other cities, which either named themselves after their city, the name of their occupation, or by a romantic name such as "One Heart" or "The Wandering Jew". After they reached the

Austro-Hungarian Austria-Hungary, often referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire,, the Dual Monarchy, or Austria, was a constitutional monarchy and great power in Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. It was formed with the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of ...

border, they were often provided funds for rail passage by charitable Jewish organizations.

Literary representation

Many of the current-day articles about the ''fusgeyers'' cite Jill Culiner's 2004 book ''Finding Home: In the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers'' for most of their factual information. Her book in turn was inspired by the

Yiddish language Yiddish (, or , ''yidish'' or ''idish'', , ; , ''Yidish-Taytsh'', ) is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated during the 9th century in Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a ver ...

memoir of one of the original ''fusgeyers'', Jacob Finkelstein's "Zikhroynes fun a fusgeyer fun Rumania kayn Amerika", which won a contest by the YIVO in 1945 and was printed in their journal, ''YIVO Bleter''.

References

{{Reflist, 2 Antisemitism in Romania Jewish Romanian history Romanian-Jewish diaspora Yiddish words and phrases