In 1907, at just 20 years of age, Celia Greenstone was hired by the New York Section of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) to serve as assistant immigrant arrival agent at Ellis Island. Ms. Greenspan was urgently needed there. Between 1892 and 1924, more than 15,000,000 immigrants – ost of them from Eastern and Southern Europe, and many of them Jews – passed through Ellis Island. The New York Section of NCJW was concerned that thousands of single Jewish women might be “misled into immoral lives, and other girls [will be] subjected to great dangers because of the lack of some directing and protecting agency at Ellis Island.” To cope with this danger, the New York Section appointed pioneer social worker Bessie Meirowitz as their Ellis Island agent. When Meirowitz’s workload became overwhelming, Celia Greenstone was hired in 1907 to serve as her assistant.

Although young, Celia Greenstone was well equipped for this work. At age thirteen , while still living in Bialystock, in Russian Poland, Celia’s father left her in charge of the family cirgarette factory while he went off on business. In his absence, Greenstone learned to deal with suppliers, customers and currupt state officials. Ath the same time, the idealistic Greenstone avidly read Karl Marx, joined a utopian socialist-Zionist movement and even unionized her father’s cigarette factory workers. A risk taker, she marched in socialist demonstrations that were brutally suppressed by the Russian police. In 1905, when Celia was 18, the family business failed and pogroms swept Bialystock, so the Greenstones emigrated to New York.

Vowing to teach herself English quickly, Celia Greenstone spent hours each day at the Astor Library in New York, voraciously reading books in English, Hebrew, German, Russian and Yiddish, which brought her to the attention of the head of the Hebrew Department. He asked Greenstone to serve as his voluteer assistant. After a few months, Greenstone asked the librarian for lunch and travel expenses and he berated her for being ungrateful. Greenstone protested her exploitation to the head librarian, who promised her a paid position. A few months later, he found Greenstone work as translator for Jacob Schiff, the leading Jewish banker and philanthropist. Impressed with Greenstone’s facility with languages, Schiff’s wife broght her to the attention of New York Section of NCJW, which hired Greenstone to assist at Ellis Island.

Greenstone worked six long days a week for months on end, ushering single women, mothers and children through the Ellis Island intake process. Greenstone was particularly moved by those women who, rejected by the health inspectors, were scheduled for deportation back to the very shtetls where proverty and pogroms threatened their survival. Greenstone intervened on behalf of several frightened young girls labeled “retarded” by the inspectors simply because they could not understand the questions posed to them in English. She helped girls traveling alone to locate their families in other parts of the country or to obtain work and respectable lodgings after they left Ellis Island. Greenstone tended those detained on the island while being cured of temporary health problems. Importantly, Greenstone arranged for kosher food to be delievered to inmates of the island hospital and established Shabbat and holiday services.

In 1912, NCJW promoted Greenstone to head agent of Ellis Island. Her responsibilities now included conducting weekly follow-up meetings at the Educational Alliance in Manhattan with women she had helped through Ellis Island to assure that they were learning English, receiving support and searching for work. Greenstone also made a weekly visit to the Bedford Reformatory for girls to visit the Jewish inmates of that institution. In 1914, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society asked Greenstone to travel as its official delegate to Riga, Latvia, to inspect a new facility constructed by the government to house Jewish emigrants awaiting passage to America.

By 1915, World War I dramatically reduced European immigrantion to America. Whereas 878,000 immigrants landed at Ellis Island in 1914, only 28,000 arrived in 1918. WHen the war ended, immigration remained restricted by a series of laws that excluded most of the Jewish immigrants wanting to enter the United States. The need for Greenstone’s services at Ellis Island ended. After marrying and having two children, she resumed her work with immigrants at settlement houses on the Lower East Side. In 1986, Celia Greenstone was posthumously elected to the New York Settlement House Hall of Fame.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2001 and is filed under history.