I am the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. With one European refugee grandparent on each side of my family, I grew up with hints of “the old country” in my daily life. Yiddish peppering our household vernacular and paprikash in our regular menu rotation just seemed normal to me, not signs of any particular heritage or identity.

As a young child, I thought everyone I knew had a family structure like mine: parents who were first generation Americans, grandparents with accented English, and the specter of a terrible past that we just didn’t talk about. Although I knew nothing of what my grandparents endured before coming to America, I fully absorbed the idea that immigration saves families.

My father’s first cousin, Peter Gorog, defected from Hungary in 1980. I grew up knowing him, strengthening my connection to my Hungarian family through our frequent visits. Peter was born in 1941 to my great aunt, Olga Schonfeld and her husband, Arpad Grunwald. 

While Hungary did not start deporting its Jews openly until 1944, they were longtime sympathizers and collaborators with the Nazis. Among the oppressive antisemitic policies that the Hungarian government enacted was the formation of forced labor camps and battalions. Arpad was sent to one of these in 1940, while Olga was pregnant with Peter. He was away for months at a time, getting a short visit home around the time of Peter's birth, and again when Peter was about a year old. After that visit, he was sent, along with his forced labor battalion, to Ukraine. Letters from him began coming less and less regularly and then stopped. The Red Cross reported him missing in January 1943. Presumably, he froze to death after being left behind by his battalion as the Soviet troops advanced.

I am a Holocaust educator. I always had an interest in the history of that period due to my personal connection, and I deepened my knowledge significantly by taking an educator’s course offered by Facing History and Ourselves. One of the underlying objectives of the course is to gain an understanding of how a democratic society can go off the rails so completely and become purveyors of violence and death – with the explicit goal of inspiring students to be active members of their communities and societies, thus forming a barrier against something like the Holocaust ever happening again. 

This is the perspective from which I teach my 8th graders about the history of the Holocaust. We spend ample class time on Hitler’s incremental rise to power, his use of propaganda to shape public opinion, how he commanded fear and unquestioning loyalty, and how he manipulated German society, manufacturing an enemy who could be blamed for Germany’s very real problems. 

We learn that Hitler drew from many sources in painting the Jewish people as deserving of extermination. He built his theories on centuries of European antisemitism originating in the Church, on racial theories that became popular in the 19th century, on America’s treatment of Black people in the Jim Crow south. 

All of this to say, I cannot look away from what is currently happening to immigrants in our country. 

We are, when it comes down to it, a nation of immigrants. My own family is here because the United States offered a safe haven at a time when being Jewish in Europe was mortally dangerous. At that time, Jews were not seen as a highly desirable class of people. In Europe, we were made out to be less than human, vermin to eradicate. And even knowing the threat to Jewish lives abroad, both the American government and the public were not eager to help people escape. But the immigration policies were more forgiving, allowing many survivors to find a home here, especially after the extent of the Nazi atrocities was made public.

We have seen this movie before – emphasizing people’s foreignness, painting them to be criminals and animals (all the while trivializing the dangers that brought them here), using the power of the media to influence hearts and minds. With suspicion of our current immigrant population well-entrenched in much of the public, our government has free rein to act against them in the name of stopping illegal immigration and protecting “real” Americans. 

And act they have. In the current climate, ICE is detaining thousands of immigrants. Some of them are here illegally, yes. But many are here on work visas, awaiting citizenship interviews, or are even American citizens. People are being targeted in places usually understood to be sanctuaries, such as schools and houses of worship. Some are being taken from courthouses, where they have come for their immigration hearings, from their workplaces, and after being pulled over for traffic stops. A significant majority of those detained have committed no serious crime. They have simply been cast as the enemy and can be dispensed with at will. 

The major domestic policy bill recently passed by Congress allocates billions to expand ICE’s reach, hiring thousands of new officers and building new detention centers, such as “Alligator Alcatraz,” which has received much attention for its deplorable conditions. 

We were once immigrants too. So much of the American Jewish community can say that we are American because America welcomed us when we were fleeing persecution and provided us a soft and stable place to land. How can we stay silent when our country is acting against some of our most deeply held values, both denying safe harbor to those who currently seek it and employing methods that are just too familiar. 

We have seen this movie before. And we cannot, should not look away.

With this end in mind, Jews United for Justice (JUFJ) is sponsoring a gathering on the afternoon of Tisha b’Av, Sunday August 3. We will come together at 2:00 PM at the George Fallon Federal Building (31 Hopkins Plz, Baltimore, MD 2120) to stand in solidarity with our immigrant neighbors and demonstrate our resistance to the current attacks on the immigrant community. We will daven Minḥah (the afternoon service) together, and learn about opportunities to take concrete steps to help the immigrant community during this frightening time. You can register here. I hope you will join me. 

Tisha b’Av is our day of collective mourning. We mourn the destruction of the Holy Temples and the exile of our people. But it doesn’t end there. Tisha b’Av is a day when we see those losses reflected in other tragedies of Jewish history. We have an opportunity this year to channel our sense of loss into positive action, working together to help ensure that what we have suffered, no one will have to endure again.