“You survive, you honor us by living,” Martin Greenfield’s father once told him. Greenfield recalled these words after his liberation from the Buchenwald concentration camp.

This poignant quote can be heard in “The Jewish Journey: America,” a PBS documentary chronicling the migrations spanning 3½ centuries of Jews fleeing persecution and serves as the underlying theme of the program. The documentary debuted in 2015.

Andrew Goldberg, known as the semi-official Jewish chronicler for PBS, produced the one-hour program and brought his expertise from previous acclaimed productions such as “The Yiddish World Remembered,” “Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century: The Resurgence,” and “Jerusalem: Center of the World.”

The film is narrated by Emmy Award-winning journalist Martha Teichner of CBS News. It features interviews with top scholars in Jewish history, notable Jewish-American writers and many immigrants themselves detailing the varied stories of migration through the last five centuries, with a rarely explored look at the actual journeys to get here.

The backstory

The first Jews to arrive in what became the United States were 23 Sephardim fleeing the Portuguese-imposed Inquisition in Brazil. They settled in New Amsterdam, in 1654, which would later become New York.

Following unsuccessful revolutions in Germany and various European nations during the 1840s, and subsequently spurred on by the influx of gold rush fortune seekers, a greater number migrated to the United States. However, by the 1870s, the Jewish population in the U.S. amounted to no more than 200,000 individuals.

The number skyrocketed to more than 4.2 million by 1927, spurred by a massive influx of 1.5 million Jews from Eastern Europe, predominantly Russia, between 1880 and 1910.

The film also speaks to the Jewish penchant for founding communities, then splitting and re-forming into even more separate groups — some 17,500 Jewish organizations existed in the U.S. in 1927.

How to watch

What: “The Jewish Journey: America”
When: Saturday, March 9, at 5:30 p.m. and Monday, March 11, at 12 a.m.
Where: NinePBS (Channel 9)