Every year for Hanukkah, my mother would gift me a book about the Holocaust. Every vacation we took, even within the continental United States, my mother insisted we carry our US passports, just in case we needed to flee at a moment’s notice. Those books and passports served as reminders of my Jewish ancestry —…
This has been a tough week for all of us at HIAS, but it has been so much worse for the people of Afghanistan. My mind is occupied by the family members of the Afghans and the Americans who were killed at Karzai Airport today, and for the many people of Afghanistan whose lives are…
As the Taliban entered Kabul, one former translator for the U.S. military felt she was living through a horror movie. “Nobody wants to leave their home because they don’t know if they’ll make it back alive,” she told me via WhatsApp on Wednesday. “The past 20 years feel like a dream. Overnight everything has changed.”…
July 28 is probably not marked on your 2021 calendar. But, as the 70th anniversary of the United Nations Refugee Convention, it is one of the most consequential days of the year for the 82.4 million people who the U.N. noted were “forcibly displaced” in 2020. In the wake of the massive upheaval of World…
When Caroline Link reread “When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit,” decades after she first read it for school, she underlined a passage where Swiss boys throw gravel at the young Jewish protagonist. She couldn’t wait to direct that scene. It’s a curious, if not quite startling moment in the chapter book, a 1971 semi-autobiographical novel of…
While President Biden made mention of immigration reform in his first address to Congress this week, the fate of refugees was conspicuously absent. After weeks of whiplash for refugees and their advocates, we’re still waiting for clarity on a path forward. On April 16, President Biden announced he would maintain the limit on the number…
(JTA) — Three weeks after taking office, Joe Biden announced that he would quadruple the number of refugees allowed into the United States. For HIAS, it seemed like an answered prayer, as the Jewish refugee aid agency had endured a rough four years under Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump. HIAS, which once focused on resettling refugees,…
Read this article in Yiddish Of the many stories my father has told me about his past, my favorite is the one about the day he became an American citizen. It was February 17, 1967. My dad sat inside the Middlesex County Courthouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey, alongside a mosaic of others, waiting to…
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