(JNi.media) The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) has not been in the Hebrew Immigrant business for generations. It was founded in 1881 to assist Jews fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe, and for a while became synonymous with American aid to Jewish families coming to America. In 1904, HIAS established a bureau on Ellis Island to provide translation and other guidance to Jewish immigrants undergoing their medical screenings, argue before the authorities to prevent deportations, and obtain bonds to guarantee their status. “We lent some the $25 landing fee and sold railroad tickets at reduced rates to those headed for other cities,” boasts the HIAS website. “We even installed a kosher kitchen, which provided more than half a million meals to new arrivals on Ellis Island.”
From 1945 to 1951, HIAS sponsored and assisted a total 167,450 emigrants: 79,675 of them came to the US, 24,049 to the British Commonwealth, 24,806 to Latin America, and 38,920 to Israel and other countries. Since 1950, HIAS’ activities followed world events—becoming available wherever and whenever Jews needed help fleeing their home countries to safety. During the 40 years of Soviet Jewish emigration, HIAS assisted more than 400,000 Soviet Jews to immigrate to the US.
Now, with the growing wave of immigrants from Muslim countries reaching US shores, HIAS saw its natural role in doing what it always has done — raise funds in the Jewish communities and then turn around and provide the newcomers with trauma counseling, art therapy, legal advice, and humanitarian assistance.
The HIAS website quotes, among several others, Julie Smolyansky, the CEO & President of Lifeway Foods, whose Jewish family was resettled in the United States from the former Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. “When I was a little girl, kids would call me names. I didn’t even know what a ‘communist’ was at the time. I’m not sure they did, either. But that’s what they called me,” Smolyansky recalls, adding, “As a refugee myself, I cannot sit quietly during the biggest refugee crisis of our time.”
HIAS President and CEO Mark Hetfield has complained that when he made an appeal at a synagogues to promote Muslim immigration to America, the members asked him why they should support bringing in people who would eventually burn down their synagogues. But, according to the Jewish Week, 3,500 synagogues have signed a HIAS petition urging the US to admit 100,000 Syrian refugees—ten times the number Obama suggested.
For the record, HIAS—which has dropped the “Hebrew” from its official name and relocated its headquarters from New York City to Silver Spring—is one of nine major federal refugee contractors, meaning that the more Syrians come, the more HIAS makes.
“If massive numbers of Muslim immigrants are allowed to enter, there is no question mark. The Golden Age of American Jewry will be at an end,” threatens Ruth King in a recent essay titled “A Watershed for America’s Jews?” She points out that the HIAS initiative “means a huge increase in Muslim immigrants, much larger than even that number suggests. … in 2013 there were 280,276 immigrants from Moslem-majority countries. Of these just under 40,000 were refugees.”
“There is no doubt that the American Jewish community is the one most threatened by this immigration,” King warns, predicting that “the radical growth in the Muslim population will have a dramatic effect on the small US Jewish population.”
Hetfield has pointed out to his Jewish audiences that the additional Syrian refugees coming to America would improve Israel’s safety. “The crisis in Syria threatens to destabilize Jordan, Lebanon, and perhaps even Turkey and Egypt,” he said. “This cannot be good for Israel.”
