In 1938, as the Nazis laid plans to annihilate European Jewry, a few desperate Jews dreamed of escaping to the other side of the world: Alaska. Joachim Hein, from Breslau, Germany, was one of many who wrote to the American Department of Interior for permission to immigrate to the vast northern territory with his wife, Anna, and daughter, Henny. “We shall in no way [be] a burden for the country,” he wrote in a letter now in the National Archives, “because we take our electric machines from here and furnish a manufacture in aprons and linen, like we have had here. But if this business is not agreeable to your Excellency, we are prepared to [do] every work.”

Interior Secretary Harold Ickes and a few others in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration liked the idea of resettling German Jews in Alaska. Despite the isolationist and anti-Jewish sentiments prevalent at the time, they proposed to establish “a haven for Jewish refugees from Germany and other areas in Europe where the Jews are subjected to oppressive restrictions.” According to Ickes’s diaries, President Roosevelt wanted to move 10,000 settlers to Alaska each year for five years, but only 10 percent would be Jewish “to avoid the undoubted criticism” the program would receive if it brought too many Jews into the country. With Ickes’s support, Interior Undersecretary Harold Slattery wrote a formal proposal titled “The Problem of Alaskan Development,” which became known as the Slattery Report. It emphasized economic-development benefits rather than humanitarian relief: The Jewish refugees, Ickes reasoned, would “open up opportunities in the industrial and professional fields now closed to the Jews in Germany.”

The proposal won few fans in the far north. Widow Emma de la Vergne in Fairbanks was one of those who thought it was a good idea. “Let the German-Jews come to Alaska if they want to. Alaska is a big country. Give them a chance,” she said when interviewed by the city’s Daily News-Miner. But most of her fellow Alaskans disagreed. “German Jews Unsuited for Alaska Settlers Is Prevailing View Here,” read the paper’s headline on November 21, 1938. A few days later, an editorial declared: “Alaska wants no misfits and none who are unprepared to make their way without becoming a burden upon the territory.” The mayor of Fairbanks compared the proposal to one that advocated turning Alaska into a penal colony.

The idea went nowhere. But fears that Jews would not be able to make it in Alaska were unfounded. Jews were among the earliest settlers of “the Last Frontier,” and had played a major role in putting it on the American map. “It’s because of the Jewish presence that Alaska was developed when it was,” says Alaska historian Patti Moss, who lives in Juneau, the state capital in southeastern Alaska. “The first banks: Jewish people. Railroads: Jewish financing. The first college: East Coast Jewish money. The entire infrastructure of Alaska was built by Jewish people, Jewish money and Jewish knowledge.”

Danish-born navigator Vitus Bering, exploring on behalf of the Russian Tsar Peter the Great, sighted Alaska on a 1741 trip to map the Siberian coast. Decades later came the promyshlenniki -- Russian fur traders and businessmen lured by Alaska’s untapped natural wealth. Among these hardy souls, it is believed, were Jewish furriers and Jews who had been exiled to Siberia by the Tsar. Most worked for the state-sponsored trading concern called the Russian-American Company, which had a monopoly on exploiting Alaska’s vast resources. One of its managers was Nikolay Yakovlevich Rosenberg, who ran the company from 1850 to 1853.

New Archangel -- renamed Sitka -- a harbor town on an island off the southeast coast, was the center of Alaskan commercial life. The first Jewish family arrived in 1848, says Moss. Alexander Cohen, whose daughters would become the state’s first postmistresses, bought two or three hotels and a brewery. The Cohens were followed by other Ashkenazi Jews from Germany who opened up a variety of businesses, including brothels. “Jews transformed Sitka from a tent city into a city,” says Moss.