Images of Refugees Resonate

For American Jews, the images resonate: refugees in boxcars; stunned families with just the clothes on their backs bundling across borders; uniformed men conducting door-to-door searches; neighbors hiding neighbors from marauding soldiers intent on “ethnic cleansing.”

Stoking emotions already ignited by these Holocaust-like scenes pouring out of Kosovo was the timing of it all. The refugee crisis coincided with the start of the annual observance of Passover, Jews’ commemoration of exodus and freedom. The expulsion of ethnic Albanians from their homeland, although a very different exodus, stirred discussion at Seder tables in millions of homes across America.

“My mother, who was with us for the Passover Seder, was in France in 1940 and fled south with nothing,” said David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee. “She looked at the TV screen and saw the refugees and said, ‘That was us.’ The identification was clear, and it was sharp. There was no ambiguity.”

But Jewish groups and leaders are careful not to compare the current tragedy to the Holocaust. Instead, they are focused on reacting quickly and forcefully to the ethnic Albanians’ plight, a response that many Jews see as a moral imperative for a people marked by the Nazis’ horrific effort to eradicate their entire population half a century ago.

“The Jewish community knows firsthand that silence breeds tragedy,” said Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League. “We are particularly proud of a country [the United States] that upholds humanitarian ideals and refuses to turn a blind eye to the horror of ethnic cleansing.”

The ADL, which last month issued statements supporting the NATO bombing campaign, is sponsoring full-page ads in two major newspapers today imploring readers to “respond as you wish the world had responded the last time.” The ads ask for donations to help “innocent victims of hatred.”

Jewish Federation chapters in several U.S. cities are running their own ads and establishing relief funds. Similarly, Jewish organizations have called on synagogues, local groups and individuals to speak out in support of the military action and the newly exiled.

Already, the three premier Jewish organizations for refugees and humanitarian assistance have undertaken aggressive efforts to aid those displaced from Kosovo, and several rabbis have contacted their leadership to start thinking about how to respond if Kosovo Albanians are resettled on U.S. soil.

Meantime, the Reform movement’s leadership this week e-mailed its 900 rabbis across North America a message seeded with memories of the Holocaust and a request for donations. “There is no need to review the details,” said the message from Rabbi Eric Yoffee, president of the Reform Jews’ Union of American Hebrew Congregations. “They haunt us from our television screens and our daily newspapers.”

The Jewish activism is consistent with how these same groups galvanized their memberships during the Bosnia upheaval in the early ‘90s, the sub-Saharan famine of the mid-1980s and the Indochina refugee crisis in the 1970s.

Only the logistics of Passover slowed their response this time around, say the leaders. And some Jews in both the U.S. and Israel perhaps hesitated to condemn the Serbs, mindful of the Serbian role against the Nazis during World War II.

Arnold Lorber, a Los Angeles businessman who is a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, remembers it well.

“As a young boy back in ‘38, I heard personal accountings of the massacre of Serbs by Hitler’s armies,” said Lorber, 68, who spent the war dodging the Germans in Slovakia and left Europe in 1949.

Still, Lorber has no sympathy for Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and called him “a little Hitler. . . . If he wasn’t afraid of CNN watching, he would do worse to the Albanians.”

So far, the uprooted ethnic Albanians are better off than the slaughtered Jews of 50 years ago, Lorber said, because the world is watching. “I never heard Radio America or BBC from ’38 to ’45 warning the Jews or the populations what was going on in Auschwitz.”

Harris, Foxman and other Jewish leaders had less interest in the Serbs’ actions during World War II and more in their current behavior.

“Yes, the Serbs were on the right side of history in the Second World War,” Harris said. “But so were the Russians. It was the Soviet army that liberated Auschwitz in January 1945. . . . But that didn’t change the fact that subsequently the Soviets were no longer a friend. Serbia has taken a tragically extremist action and must be condemned.”

Harris and others said they expect the Jewish community, so profoundly unsettled by the stories about refugees who look a lot like Jews left homeless 54 years ago, to become even more activist next week when Congress returns to the Capitol, where debate over refugee resettlement and ground troops is likely to intensify.