Honoring immigrants - The Jewish Standard

Between the story I wrote last week about walking through the south Bronx and the one I wrote this week about Nishmat, I’ve been thinking a lot about immigration.

I do not understand how immigration came to be a dirty word, describing a dirty concept.

I grew up in awe of immigrants. I understood that if they hadn’t come here, I wouldn’t be here; that if my grandparents and great-grandparents hadn’t left their Central and Eastern European homes, far from the Atlantic, not only to reach the great ocean — imagine smelling salt water for the first time — but to cross it; to leave everything they had ever known, most likely never to see it again, to get to someplace I’m sure they couldn’t possibly imagine. To say goodbye forever to everyone except the very few traveling with them.

Maybe they thought about how they’d have to learn a new language, or maybe their imaginations did not allow them to get that far ahead of themselves, because yes, Europeans knew far more languages than we do, but English generally was not among them.

My family, like many other Jewish families, came to this country in the early twentieth century, when it was hard to get here but relatively easy to stay. They would have seen the Statue of Liberty as they reached Manhattan. I don’t know what that would have felt like, but I imagine joy at the sight of her torch.

I thought about immigrants when I was on Fox Street in the Bronx. Dr. David Herszenson, the unlikely, wonderful tour guide, told us that the Bronx was a refuge for fairly new Americans who’d done well enough to leave the Lower East Side and then upper Manhattan, but it’s still been a haven for immigrants from central, eastern, and southern Europe — I have a friend whose Jewish family lived on Arthur Avenue, surrounded not only by Italians, as you’d expect, but also by Albanians — and then for newly arrived would-be Americans from Central and South America.

I know how lucky I am, to be born someplace that I do not want to leave and I do not feel that I have to leave. (I understand that things are changing, but we are nowhere near that terrible position. At least not yet.) And I am eternally grateful for those people who were brave enough to make that move.

And then there’s Nishmat, and the Ethiopian-Israeli women it teaches, mentors, and supports. Not all but most Israeli Jews are descended from people who left their homes to find refuge there. That’s true of the Ethiopians as well, but the Ethiopians come from a different culture, and they stand out because they look different. Assimilation into the mainstream hasn’t always been so easy.

Nishmat helps women join the mainstream by honoring their brains, drive, and commitment. It takes immigrants and the children of immigrants and shows them a way to move forward without giving up the past. It approaches immigration the way we all used to, as a risk, and it honors immigrants the way we used to — and still should — as heroes, braving the unknown to find a better future for themselves and their children.

I hope that someday we again will understand the value of immigration and the raw courage of immigrants.

—JP

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