Religious Persecution was the push factor that brought many European Jews to the United States beginning in the late 1800s.
Religious persecution refers to the systematic mistreatment of an individual or group of individuals as a reaction to their religious beliefs or affiliations or lack thereof.
The New England colonies, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland were considered and established "as plantations of religion."
Many of the British North American colonies that eventually formed the United States of America were settled in the seventeenth century by men and women, who fled from European religious persecution.