In November 2016, just days after the election, Lili Shidlovski and her partner, Dennis Owen, sat across their kitchen table from a Guatemalan family. The man, who had been in the U.S. for a few years, spoke only a few words of English. His wife and 9-year-old son, who had just been released from a…
In Terre Haute, Indiana, a man named Marvin Gabrion has been in prison awaiting death for 17 years, seven months and 11 days. He committed his crimes in 1996 and 1997, then was tried, convicted of murder and sentenced in 2002. Gabrion is currently the longest-serving inmate on federal death row, and though he terrorized…
(JTA) — More than 1,400 Jewish clergy from across the United States have signed a letter that calls on government officials to protect the legal right to seek asylum in the United States. HIAS, an immigrant advocacy and aid group formerly known as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, organized the petition. It calls on elected officials…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Days after launching a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren pledged her salary to HIAS, the Jewish immigration advocacy group, as long as the government is shut down. “Over 7,000 people in Massachusetts have been sent home or are working without pay during the #TrumpShutdown,” Warren said Tuesday,…
Jared Kushner hasn’t had anything to say to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). In the early days of the Trump administration, the organization shared with the president’s son-in-law documentation of his grandparents’ immigration to the United States, with no response, the New Yorker reported. It still hasn’t heard from him, days after a gunman…
Etz Chaim: The Tree of Life. How painfully ironic. The metaphoric expression “Tree of Life” ( Etz Chaim in Hebrew) is a mystical symbol within the Kabbala of esoteric Judaism used to describe the path to God. Yesterday’s unredeemable act of evil within the walls of The Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburg is physically,…
Mark Hetfield was in synagogue on Saturday morning, attending a bar mitzvah. He couldn’t figure out why his phone wouldn’t stop buzzing. When he checked his messages, Hetfield, who is the executive director of the Jewish refugee aid group HIAS, learned that the suspect in the massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue had posted obsessively about…
(JTA) — The United States will cut the number of refugees that it will accept for 2019, to the lowest level set since the Refugee Act became law in 1980. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Monday that up to 30,000 refugees will be resettled in the United States in 2019 under the new…
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