Closing America’s golden door

Almost two years ago to the day, my synagogue, Temple B’nai Abraham, and Temple Beth Shalom, both in Livingston, sponsored two Ukrainian women fleeing war and violence. The sponsorship was under the auspices of HIAS’s Refugee Resettlement Program. The work of our lay leaders over the course of almost a year before they arrived, was harrowing and awe-inspiring: housing, transportation, job placement, fundraising, language support, healthcare, legal assistance. The tasks were burdensome and all-consuming, but the result, a safe and secure life in a stable country, was lifegiving, for the volunteers and newcomers alike.

For many American Jews today, our immigrant stories are told through the lens of opportunity: the escape from persecution, the arrival at New York Harbor, and the freedom to make a living as one saw fit. This was the image of America that Emma Lazarus offered in her 1883 sonnet, “The New Colossus,” now famously displayed inside the Statue of Liberty. The poem concludes:

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Lazarus was born to a well-to-do Jewish family in New York in 1849. “The New Colossus” does not tell her own story; it is instead a poetic rendering of what she saw outside her bedroom window: Thousands of Jews escaping Russian pogroms, seeking and finding refuge in America.

But when the Johnson-Reed Act was passed in 1924, that golden door, through which walked close to three million Jews between 1880 and 1924, was slammed shut. Quota systems significantly curtailed Jewish immigration to the United States and were not eased even while the Nazis were marching through Europe. Famously, in 1939, the U.S. turned away the MS St. Louis, an ocean liner carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees from Europe. The ship eventually was forced to return abroad, where hundreds of its passengers ultimately were killed in concentration camps.

If you peer through the fog of the dozens of executive orders President Trump signed in his first few weeks in office, one thing is clear: Current American immigration policy looks a lot more as it did in 1924 and 1939 than in Emma Lazarus’s world, in 1883.

These executive orders not only direct federal forces to detain and deport undocumented migrants, they also direct those forces to inquire into the status of people who are in this country legally, and place them at risk of having that status not renewed.

The two women our community welcomed from Ukraine no longer have the protections they had been promised upon arrival. Federal funding for refugee resettlement has been suspended, and humanitarian parole is likely to be paused. Hundreds of thousands fleeing war, violence, and persecution, people who have waited years for an interview to enter the United States, now are stuck in a real-world purgatory.

Movement and the necessity of physical and emotional stability lie at the heart of Torah. In Genesis 12, Abraham is called on to a spiritual mission, but only 10 verses later he is redirected toward Egypt because of a famine in the land. The Talmud teaches, “If there is no food, there is no Torah.” The human right to flee, and the human right to be welcomed, are essential to our story in both directions.

The golden doors are closing, and we must, with all of our heart, soul, and might, fight to pry them open once more, and to actualize yesterday’s promise of America, today.

Rabbi Max Edwards of South Orange is the associate rabbi at Temple B’nai Abraham in Livingston. He is a graduate of Hebrew College Rabbinical School in Newton, Massachusetts.

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