"We used to take refugees because they were Jewish. Now we take them because we're Jewish."
In September, after the world was shocked by the photo of drowned 3-year-old refugee Aylan Kurdi, many Americans were asking how they could help.
As it happened, that coincided with the Jewish High Holidays. My synagogue, and plenty of others, made a serious push during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services to help Syrian refugees. That coordinated effort was the work of HIAS — the Jewish organization for refugee resettlement and immigration advocacy (formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society).
HIAS has helped refugees and immigrants settle in America for more than a century. But for most of that period, the refugees they were helping were Jews: Eastern European Jews in the first half of the 20th century, then Jews fleeing the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Nowadays, most refugees aren't Jewish. In fact, the presumptive Republican nominee for president is calling on the US to prevent Muslims from arriving in the US — and several governors are responding to rising Islamophobia by trying to keep some, or all, refugees out of their states. But HIAS and other faith-based organizations are still on the front lines of aiding refugees.
We are one of the nine refugee resettlement agencies [organizations that the government contracts with to help integrate refugees in the United States, and pair up with individual refugees]. We resettle refugees to the United States and receive them in communities, get them set up in new homes, get the kids to school, get them jobs, etc. That's always been the core work of the agency.
Our resettlement system was established in the late 1970s, to deal with the Soviet Jewry movement, to be the way to think globally and act locally when it came to Soviet Jews. We were able to enlist more than 100 Jewish communities and federations, Jewish Family Services agencies around the country, to welcome Soviet Jews, and welcome them to American society and to the American Jewish community at the local level. That was done through us, and that's how our system was developed.
We're definitely trying to find ways to engage local Jewish communities in this, even if they've dropped out. But right now, we're kind of rethinking and redesigning the way we do refugee resettlement at the local level, because we know we have to update our model from the Soviet Jewry era. Now we welcome refugees not because they're Jewish, but because we're Jewish.
archive.is
twitter.com
