The man accused of the synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh seemed fixated on HIAS, the refugee organization that helped save my family.
EAST WINDSOR, N.J. — For many years, I have wished more Americans would know about HIAS. Now I am heartbroken by why they will.
The man charged with killing 11 people on Saturday at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh posted a message online just a few hours before the massacre: “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
Many Americans are now wondering what HIAS is and who it brings to America. I first heard of those four letters in 1989, when I was nine years old and my family fled anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. At the time, we didn’t know HIAS stood for “Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society,” or that it had been helping migrant Jews since 1881. All we knew was to head for the main train station in Vienna where, rumor had it, people who worked for this strange acronym would help.
For the next six months, HIAS became the most important entity in my life. It was HIAS workers who were pulling us, and tens of thousands of others, off the trains in Austria; HIAS that got us settled in refugee camps; HIAS that rallied American Jewish communities to sponsor refugees in the United States. “HIAS will help,” I silently intoned, as we hitchhiked like phantoms along Austrian roads and went through awful asylum interviews at the American embassy.
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HIAS was what remained when the rest of your life had disintegrated, when there was no money, no way to communicate, no going back. HIAS was what kept you tethered to the world when you became a ghost, but weren’t yet ready to die.
Two decades after I came to America, HIAS found itself at the crossroads. For the first time in memory, there weren’t large numbers of Jews in need of resettlement. It was other people who needed help: children fleeing gang violence in Central America, victims of wars in East Asia, and most of all, refugees from the wars in the Middle East — people who had endured horrors that make my family’s experience seem like a luxury cruise in comparison.
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Some felt it was inappropriate for HIAS, a Jewish group, to devote resources to aiding Muslims; HIAS, to its eternal credit, disagreed. As Mark Hetfield, the president and chief executive of HIAS, once told me, “We decided to help, not because they are Jewish, but because we are Jewish.” On Oct. 19, HIAS organized a national refugee Shabbat.
The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society became simply HIAS, to reflect the fact that about 90 percent of its clients were no longer Jewish. Offices sprang up in Kenya, Greece, Venezuela and Chad. The group engaged the same American Jewish communities that had adopted families like mine; today, more than 400 Jewish communities — including Pittsburgh’s — have committed themselves to helping refugees. And after Donald Trump became president, HIAS became one of the most vigorous and vocal opponents of the White House’s attempts to ban refugees.
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What does HIAS mean today? To refugees around the world, it’s become an international word for hope, in dozens of tongues and for numerous faiths. To me, it symbolizes America — and Judaism — at its best. And it’s easy to see how HIAS stands for everything white supremacists hate: tolerance, understanding and empathy.
And who does HIAS bring into this country? I could easily rattle off a list of refugee all-stars: celebrity actors, Olympic athletes, pathbreaking inventors, acclaimed musicians and writers and artists. You might not know they were once refugees, but I can assure you — you know who they are. But that would be missing the point. HIAS didn’t help them because they could sing or write code; it helped them because they needed help.
The majority of HIAS’s clients aren’t famous, and while you probably don’t know their names, they’re part of your world nonetheless. They are people who used to be merchants and goat herders and professors. Some have stayed in their fields in America; many did not. They drive your taxis, dress your wounds, clean your houses. They watch over your businesses while you sleep. They know that the United States can give you a new life, but they also know it comes with a cost.
Two weeks ago, I’ve had a chance to reflect on just who it is that HIAS brings to this country after another HIAS client passed away: my mother.
Mom, like many older immigrants, had discovered firsthand that there’s a steep admission price to America. For 30 years, she had been a doctor in Ukraine, but the language barrier made that impossible when she came to America. The first few years here were awful: She felt she went from being a physician to being useless. It wasn’t until she began working as a night security guard that she finally felt happy again.
Immigration left my family strewn across three continents, which meant that more than half of those attending Mom’s funeral were native-born Americans. And so on a sunny fall afternoon, I watched a small caravan of Russian and English speakers wind across a patch of forest next to the office park in suburban New Jersey that Mom used to guard.
I watched these people honor Mom’s last wish: scatter her ashes at the place where she was reborn in America. I watched them celebrate the life of an immigrant who had every reason to be bitter at her lot in this country, and yet loved it and worked in it with honor. And I silently thanked HIAS for the strength and the grace it imports to America.
That’s what HIAS stands for. That’s who HIAS brings to this country.
Lev Golinkin is the author of the memoir “A Backpack, a Bear and Eight Crates of Vodka.
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