Rediscovering a Common Bond on Immigration

A ship carrying almost 1,000 fearful refugees sails from Havana toward the coast of Florida. The passengers are desperately seeking a safe harbor, knowing that a return to their homeland would mean political persecution, perhaps even death.

But instead of finding sanctuary in the United States, the vessel is intercepted by the Coast Guard. Due to strict immigration quotas, the ship is denied entry and forced out to sea.

The story sounds familiar, but it doesn’t involve Latino or Asian immigrants. The ship was named the St. Louis, a luxury liner of German registry. The year was 1939.

And the passengers were mostly Jews. In flight from the Nazis, they had hoped to make port in Cuba and later come to the United States. But the unwelcome ship eventually returned to Europe where most of its passengers perished in the Holocaust.

I had never heard the tragic tale of the St. Louis until last week, sorry to say. I obviously missed “Voyage of the Damned,” the mid-1970s book and movie about the rejected refugees.

The story was told to me by Joyce Greenspan, director of the Anti-Defamation League of Orange County and Long Beach. She had invited me to a meeting of the ADL’s Jewish-Latino Round Table, a forum for building personal and political relationships between the two communities.

The Holocaust anecdote came up because I asked Greenspan why many Jews today respond so passionately to the immigration issue.

“This goes way, way to the heart of the Jewish people,” she explained. “We’ve been on that side too many times as a people to ever, ever look at immigration as something we would want to stop.”

Since the end of World War II, Jews and Latinos have forged historic alliances over shared concerns about social justice. The current round tables, also held in Los Angeles, underscore the enduring strength of coming together on common ground.

Last week’s dinner meeting featured Sue Stengel, an ADL attorney from Los Angeles who gave a lively crash course on hate crimes. Also on the agenda: a statement denouncing the board of the Anaheim Union High School District for its recent decision to bill foreign countries (it means Mexico) for the cost of educating undocumented students.

In their resolution adopted last month, the grandstanding trustees also asked that immigration agents help them identify the undocumented students, so they’ll know how much to bill.

“This is so unbelievably offensive,” said Stengel, the ADL’s western region counsel, as she read a summary of the board’s action during the round table.

She suggested, however, that the response drafted by LULAC, a Latino advocacy group, needed a little legalizing. The round table voted to support a statement condemning the Anaheim board, pending Stengel’s revision.

Another example of intergroup cooperation: top-notch legal assistance at no charge.

Nowadays, some say that the once-fruitful union of Latinos and Jews has aged and soured. The two groups have grown apart, geographically and economically. There’s no longer any basis, skeptics argue, for the old labor alliance that 50 years ago produced political breakthroughs for Latinos in L.A.

Besides, time has supposedly blurred the collective memories of a shared immigrant experience, especially as Jews became more assimilated and removed from recent Latino arrivals.

Don’t tell that to Greenspan, a second-generation American with vivid memories of her immigrant grandparents. On her mother’s side, her family fled the terrors of Czarist Russia. Greenspan remembers the eternal imprint of violence on her maternal grandmother’s forehead--the indented shape of a screw made when a bed fell on her head as a little girl.

On her father’s side her grandmother spoke Hungarian at home, and she died without ever learning English. So Greenspan is tolerant of Latino immigrants today who struggle with the new language.

Not surprisingly, Jewish voters rejected Proposition 187, the measure that would have deprived undocumented immigrants of most social services, including public education. The current move by the Anaheim school trustees, though practically powerless, reflects their frustration over rejection of the initiative as unconstitutional.

But Greenspan finds it horrifying for the government to systematically target certain groups of children. And no wonder. In researching the story of the St. Louis, I came across the following entry in a chronology of Nazi persecution, just six months before the ship set sail.

November 15, 1938: Jewish children were expelled from German schools.

Never again.

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Agustin Gurza’s column appears on Tuesday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or online at agustin.gurza@latimes.com