Kudos to the calling on the United States government to welcome refugees from Syria. An impressive feat, even in the digital age, to gather such a large number of supporters on a hotly debated political topic in such a short period of time. Even so, the petition represents a fundamental misread of American Jewish history,…
With 12 million Syrians forced from their homes in the past four years, the refugee crisis has hit levels not seen since World War II. For Jewish charities in the field, September 3 was a turning point. That was the day multiple media outlets published photographs of a 3-year-old Syrian boy named Aylan Kurdi, showing…
Two U.S. Jewish organizations said the Obama administration’s offer to absorb at least 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next year was inadequate. “Increasing the total number of refugees from 70,000 to 85,000 for next year and to 100,000 for the year after is a nice symbolic gesture,” Mark Hetfield, the president of HIAS, a Jewish…
Of the four million Syrians who have fled their war-torn country in recent years, at least 135,000 of them require immediate resettlement. But America has absorbed fewer than 1,000. For Jewish activists pushing the government to shift gears, that feeble number and the accompanying bottleneck in resettlement of Syrian refugees are troubling reminders of their…
I’ve loved train travel ever since I was a small child. For the summer trips we made from Moscow to visit Tuapse, a town on the shore of the Black Sea where my grandparents lived, I shared a four-berth compartment with my parents. We would eat boiled eggs, tomatoes and cucumbers we had packed, discuss…
Asylum-seekers Detained in Israel’s Desert from Jewish Daily Forward on Vimeo. HIAS, a U.S. Jewish organization dealing with refugees, criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for seeking the continued detention of asylum seekers. Netanyahu on Tuesday asked ministers to draft new legislation that would allow the government to work around a Supreme Court ruling in…
Twenty Jewish organizations are urging President Obama and Congress to deal humanely with the unaccompanied children and refugees that are crossing the border and entering the United States. The statement released on Tuesday, which was written by HIAS, calls on the government to “welcome the stranger” in dealing with those entering the United States through…
June 20 is World Refugee Day. Let’s use the opportunity of this annual commemoration by the United Nations to put the “refugee crises” facing the U.S. and Israel in perspective with the true crisis exploding in Syria. The United States and Israel are countries built by refugees. A refugee is someone who flees persecution in…
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