Litvak migration to southern Africa, 1881-1940

My thesis on the ,Litvak 343 Migration to Southern Africa, 1881 to 1940' aims to analyze some of the aspects of one of the major currents in the East European Jewish migration. The pogroms tolerated by the Tsarist authorities following the assasination of the Imperator Alexander II. in 1881 initiated a wawe of migration to the Americas, western Europe, southern Africa and Australia as well as pioneer Zionist colonisation in Palestine. Even today, 90 per cent of the South African Jews are Litvaks, a vast majority of them with roots in the area of the Kaunas gubernia of Tsarist Russia (since 1918, the Lithuanian republic) and present-day Latvia. During the 1920s and 1930s, states throughout the world began to apply more restrictive immmigration policies, creating a major factor in the history of destruction of European 342 Rozhovory s přeživšími holocaustu žijícími v Kapském Městě vyšly jako Schrire, Gwynne (ed.): In Sacred Memory. Recollections of the Holocaust Survivors living in Cape Town, Cape Town 1995 343 ,Litvak' is a term used for a Jewish person with origins on the territory of the pre-1772 Lithuanian state, encompassing the present-day territory of Lithuania (except for the region of Klaipda), Belarus and the region of Suwałki in Poland as well as the Latgale region in Latvia. Today, most Litvaks..