Jacob Pritzker and his family, along with most of the Jewish population, left Bila Tsirk’va after 1855 to move to Podol, where Nicholas was born. Jacob’s son, Nicholas, was only ten years old when the Anti-Jewish pogroms broke out in Kyiv in 1881. Nicholas sailed for the U.S. in 1922, and moved to Chicago where Secretary Pritzker’s grandfather, Jay, was born that same year.