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Two elderly survivors of the Holocaust sat in the front row at Seattle’s Temple de Hirsch Sinai on Thursday night, as a crowd of 800 joined in a powerful chant: “Say it loud! Say it clear! Refugees are welcome here!”
They were reminders of a time, nearly 80 years ago, when the United States refused to accept 20,000 German refugee children, and the government plotted to keep Jews fleeing Nazi persecution out of the U.S.
“The arguments we are hearing are the same ones heard 80 years ago,” said Dee Simon, executive director of the Holocaust Center for Humanity. And, cried Rabbi Will Berkovitz of Jewish Family Services, “We are not going back to the 1930s.”
The synagogue rally was in protest against the executive order signed by President Trump last Friday night.
Trump slashed the number of refugees allowed into the United States from 110,000 to 50,000. Trump barred refugees, immigrants and travelers from seven countries with predominantly Muslim populations. There are, at present, approximately 65 million displaced persons around the globe.
The Trump order has stirred protests. As well, it has stirred memories of harrowing escapes and hiding from what one Holocaust student has called “the theory and practice of hell.”
Eva Tannenbaum Cummins, 94, left a Berlin bedecked with swastika flags in August 1939.
“Two weeks before! Two weeks before!” she said, referring to the outbreak of World War II on Sept. 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. She and her mother made it out because a cousin had signed an affidavit.
Pete Metzelaar and his mother hid from Nazi occupiers in The Netherlands starting in 1942.
“By that time my entire family had disappeared,” he said. “My mother, in some manner, got hold of people in the underground — how, I’ll never know, although I asked her many times.”
The two hid on a farm for 2½ years and then found a room in The Hague. The family providing refuge was about to turn them in. Metzelaar’s mother fashioned a nurse’s uniform. The two sneaked out in the middle of the night. They went to the single road leading to Amsterdam — reserved for German troops — and hitchhiked.
A lorry driven by two SS officers drove up. The Nazis berated Metzelaar’s mother for being on a road forbidden to the Dutch. She conjured a story, that the boy’s parents had been killed in an Allied air raid, and that she, as a Red Cross nurse, was taking him to an orphanage.
Metzelaar, a 10-year-old boy, found himself riding in the back of the truck while his mother sat in the front between the two SS officers.
There’s nothing like a Nazi roundup to focus the mind, even 75 years later. And to focus minds on active resistance.
“We are laying the groundwork for creating our own version of a sanctuary movement,” said Rabbi Daniel Weiner, senior rabbi at Temple de Hirsch Sinai. And that will include “physically protecting people,” he added.
The sanctuary effort is gaining momentum, both in Reform Judaism and in the Seattle faith community. St. Mark’s Cathedral said earlier in the week that it will protect undocumented immigrants and refugees that come to its sanctuary.
The effort also seeks to have people pause, think for themselves and consider implications for the country of Trump’s ban and likely crackdown.
And its goal is to bolster those seeking the American dream, who fear roundups that will rip apart families, disrupt young peoples’ educations and throw people out of a country where some have lived for decades.
“If we let persons know that we have noticed, that we are motivated, that we are fighting — that they have not been left alone and forgotten — it’s a huge, huge expression in their lives,” said Rabbi Berkovitz.
The gathering Thursday night heard from a young man whose family left apartheid South Africa, from Jewish “refuseniks” who emigrated from the Soviet Union, from an Iraqi who worked as a translator for U.S. soldiers.
State Sen. Reuven Carlyle, D-Seattle, spoke of kinfolk who escaped the Third Reich’s clutches just before the outbreak of World War II. “We stand with you because we made it out by two weeks,” Carlyle told the crowd.
One unspoken name hung over Thursday night’s gathering — Breckenridge Long. Long served as assistant secretary of state in charge of the Visa Division from 1940 to late 1944.
Breckenridge Long was an intense nativist, a Steve Bannon of his time. He conjured ways to undermine President Roosevelt’s easing of entry restrictions. One requirement: Anyone with relatives in Germany, Italy or Russia had to undergo an extreme vetting process.
“We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States,” Long said in a June 1940 memo.
Weiner was blunt at Temple de Hirsch Sinai on Thursday. “I never thought we would be in this place again,” he said, noting that Americans are “descendents of the rescued, the reborn and the tempest tossed.”
“Will we live out the values of Torah and tradition, or succumb to the pressures of the moment?” Weiner asked.
“There is no sitting this one out.”
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