Leslie Gutterman, a senior rabbi in Providence, connects the experiences of immigrants to those of Jewish Americans in an article in the Providence Journal.
THERE IS A VERY SMALL photograph of my paternal grandfather hanging in my study. It is only one inch both in its height and width. The picture is attached to “Certificate of Citizenship Petition #74446” which states that Jacob Gutterman, age 32, is Polish.
Truth to tell, Jews at that time may have dwelled within the borders of Poland but they were not allowed to be of Poland. They dwelled in small, isolated villages (shtetls) removed from the mainstream of Polish civic and cultural life. Their future was not bright, though who would have predicted that most of the Jews of Poland would be murdered by the Nazis?
Jacob and Ida Gutterman, along with his brothers and their wives, chose the path of immigration that led to U.S. citizenship. Grandpa’s brother Abram stayed in New York City, where he opened the first Jewish mortuary in Manhattan, still known to this day as “Gutterman Funeral Home,” although the business was sold to a conglomerate long ago.
Jacob and his brother Henry moved to Detroit, where Grandpa resumed his livelihood as a tailor. My dad, aunt and uncle were born in a neighborhood whose nearby synagogue and kosher butcher shop were frequented by those who had been my grandparents’ neighbors in the old country.
Grandma and Grandpa never became truly Americanized. They spoke Yiddish at home. My dad (tenderhearted and gentle even as a youngster) was their only child who would answer in their mother tongue rather than English. A family amusement was getting Grandma Gutterman to pronounce correctly the name of the 1939 Republican presidential candidate as Wendell Wilkie and not as she inevitably did — Vendell Vilkie. Dad decided to become a dentist rather than a doctor, so that he could more quickly earn the money needed to put his brother Meyer through medical school.
Such an American story has been rewritten many times with varying ethnic scripts. However, the saga of Jewish immigration has not always been so sanguine. There have also been sorrowful chapters of forced emigration.
In 1940, the population of Warsaw numbered 1.2 million people. By the fall of that year, the Jews of that city were walled into a 3.5-square-mile area. Their numbers were almost one-third of the city’s population because the Nazis forced so many Jews to move into this constricted space. Thirty percent of Warsaw’s population now lived in less than 3 percent of the available space in Warsaw. No wonder that 830,000 men, women and children would soon die of hunger. Some 300,000 Jews were taken to Treblinka on their way to Auschwitz. The remainder were killed, captured or deported when the Germans leveled the city.
Jews have also experienced illegal immigration. Many have read Leon Uris’ novel Exodus. Its main character was played by Paul Newman in the movie version. He was modeled after Yossi Harvel, who died in Tel Aviv this past April at 90.
When he was only 28, Havel became involved in the clandestine effort to smuggle Jews from Europe into Palestine. He ran four ships that held more than 24,000 illegal immigrants into Palestine. The country was then limited by the British white paper of 1939 to 75,000 Jews, only a fraction of those trying to escape from the Nazis. The most famous of Havel’s ships was renamed Exodus 1947. It never made it to its destination.
The sight of British forces boarding the dilapidated ship, killing three and injuring hundreds in a violent clash, was seen as a dramatic symbol of injustice. The ship’s passenger list included 4,553 people (655 of them youngsters) who were mostly Holocaust survivors. Sadly, the British delivered them to an old Nazi SS Camp near Hamburg after the refugees went on a hunger strike for more than three weeks in the sweltering heat of summer.
As it turned out, a special committee of the United Nations was in Palestine at the time. Witnessing this spectacle influenced its decision to support the creation of the State of Israel.
One has to be careful in making facile historical comparisons, but it seems a fair conclusion that there have been, and still are, many unfair, unjust laws and protocols about how to deal with illegal immigration.
In many ways, the Catholic Church has pointed the way to thinking about the thorny issue of illegal immigration in a humane way. Pope Benedict reminded a large audience on “World Day of Migrants and Refugees” that Jesus, Mary and Joseph were refugees when they fled Herod. Benedict emphasized the church’s teaching that every human being is of infinite value by virtue of being created in God’s image. He also reminded his listeners of the Catholic priority of keeping families together. American bishops have lobbied for the family to remain as a single unit. There are immigration restrictions on the books that work against this goal. Thus Cardinal Sean O’Malley stated that “the immigration policy we need in the U.S. must be based on the cornerstone of respect for the dignity of every human person.”
Such a theological stance is politically consequential. As Michael Sean Winter observed, “The pope’s pro-family stance is extremely resonant with Latino voters, many of whom come from families with mixed legal status: A wife with a green card and an undocumented husband, for example, or undocumented parents with citizen children.”
The raid on a factory in New Bedford that tore immigrant families asunder repulsed many at the time. Instead of identifying foreigners with a criminal class intent on threatening the underpinnings of the American economy, let us, at least, keep in mind that we are usually dealing with someone’s mother, father, brother or sister. How would we want another country to treat our own kin regardless of their immigration status? Let us begin a conversation in the public square about the kind of laws that at the very least would ensure a treatment of immigrants that is worthy of America’s best traditions.
On July 25, 1867, a young woman of Sephardic Jewish ancestry signed the visitor’s book at the Touro Synagogue, in Newport. President George Washington many years before had sent a letter to her Great-Uncle Moses Seixas, addressed to the Newport Congregation. It contained this sentence: “For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens . . . .”
Emma Lazarus became famous because of her sonnet, which was put on a plaque in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in 1903. The poem has the title “The New Colossus:”
“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,/With conquering links astride from land to land, /Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand/ A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame/ Is the imprisoned lightening, and her name/ Mother of Exiles. From her beacon — hand/ Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command/The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. /‘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 refuge of your teeming shore. /Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. /I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’ ”
This famous lamp is still lifted aloft along with the aspiration of those who yearn to live in America, who hope that the light of liberty will illumine their path to citizenship as it once did for my grandparents.
Leslie Y. Gutterman is senior rabbi of Temple Beth-El, Providence.
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