North America
The United States and Canada were the major focus of Polish political and economic migration after 1850 and up until the fall of the Iron Curtain. Many North American Jews trace their ancestry to Poland, which was Europe's Jewish heartland before World War II. Some 3 million Polish Jews were killed in the Holocaust; however, there's a revival of contemporary Jewish life in the new democratic Poland.
Read more about this topic: Polish Diaspora
Famous quotes containing the words north america, north and/or america:
“The English were very backward to explore and settle the continent which they had stumbled upon. The French preceded them both in their attempts to colonize the continent of North America ... and in their first permanent settlement ... And the right of possession, naturally enough, was the one which England mainly respected and recognized in the case of Spain, of Portugal, and also of France, from the time of Henry VII.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Exporting Church employees to Latin America masks a universal and unconscious fear of a new Church. North and South American authorities, differently motivated but equally fearful, become accomplices in maintaining a clerical and irrelevant Church. Sacralizing employees and property, this Church becomes progressively more blind to the possibilities of sacralizing person and community.”
—Ivan Illich (b. 1926)
“Outside America I should hardly be believed if I told how simply, in my experience, Dover Street merged into the Back Bay.”
—Mary Antin (1881–1949)