Jewish Woman Helps Eritrean Refugees Get Settled In Brooklyn
Image by Josh Wineberg
A Jewish woman and her rabbi husband are helping two Eritrean refugees get settled in New York City – after the mother and daughter arrived in the United States earlier this month.
“I got a call and they said, ‘Your friend Saba has been approved and would you consider being her U.S. sponsor,’” Mara Getz Sheftel, a professor at Brooklyn College, told DNAInfo.
“I had no idea that would happen, but there’s no choice — we’re not putting her back in limbo,” she said of her friend and asylum seeker Saba Gebremichael.
Gebremichael fled Eritrea a decade ago, after being persecuted for her Protestant faith and forced to serve in the military. She eventually escaped to Israel, where she had a daughter, Koki.
Like many Eritreans in Israel, she was not able to receive permanent asylum in the country – where she met Sheftel and her husband, Rabbi Josh Weinberg.
After being accepted as a refugee, Gebremichael is looking for work as a housecleaner and living for now with Sheftel, Weinberg and their three children.
Contact Daniel J. Solomon at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
