KOL NIDRE SERMON: BORDER CROSSERS
|
|
Tomorrow, I’m happy to report, I’m scheduled to be offered an aliyah to the Torah. Like a responsible gabbai, Morah Holly asked me for my Hebrew name. In fine rabbinic tradition, I gave her a complicated answer. My parents’ names aren’t Hebrew. They’re Yiddish. Yeshia Hesh and Rokhl. And my Jewish name is not, as folks sometimes guess, Micha-el. It’s Rachmiel. I’m named after my great aunt Rokhl — or, as she’d come to be known upon immigrating to this country from Eastern Europe — Aunt Rose. She made her living as garment worker, like her sister Ruth, my maternal grandmother, and their sisters.
After working all day in sweatshops, these sisters would sit at kitchen tables, late into the night, with piles of fabric, taking on extra piecemeal work. The pennies added up. My immigrant ancestors clothed a city. (Or at least a borough.) They endured painstaking daily labor to put clothing on the backs of their American neighbors.
Ruth and Rose left behind everything they know for a life of uncertainty in a strange land. They did so because this country held out the promise of opportunity, yes. But, also the promise of freedom from Jew-haters in Europe, the Cossacks that regularly assaulted our family. In one gruesome example, my grandmother, weakened by undernourishment and rickets, lay helpless in her bed while a Cossack assaulted her mother.
They came for the promise of sustenance and safety — a new home, in a new land. A land that rang a loud and clear bell for liberty. And I’m not talking a fancy metaphorical bell. There was a real bell. It was called the Liberty Bell. It even had a quote on it from Torah, from Leviticus: Ukratem dror ba’aretz, l’chol yoshveha. “Proclaim liberty throughout the land, to all the inhabitants in it.”[1]
The reason the bell’s founders wanted our text about liberty is unclear. All we know for certain is that, in 1752, Pennsylvania assembly speaker Isaac Norris asked the assembly’s agent in London, Robert Charles, to go buy a bell. His messages instructed Charles to inscribe the bell with that specific verse.
Isaac Norris may have left his motivation vague. But the rabbis in the Talmud don’t usually do vague. “Rabbi Yehudah asked: Mah lashon d’ror? What’s this word, dror, liberty?” And like a good rabbi, he answers his own question: “D’ror [refers to] a person medayyar bei dayara — who can dwell in any dwelling.” Wherever they want in the land. And, further, he adds — who can “do their business throughout the whole country.”[2] Freedom of movement — of course that would be the Jewish definition of liberty.
Jews have always known, in our guts, what it means to search, to scrimp, to scrap, to start over, to march off the edge of the map. To make a life where you can make a living.
Whether in text, or in our families’ journeys, the immigrant experience is part of the Jewish spiritual DNA. It’s in our very name. Before we were Jews or Israelites, before we spoke Yiddish or Ladino, we were Hebrews. The word in Hebrew for “Hebrew” is Ivri. It literally means “boundary-crosser.” “Border crosser.”
Torah genealogy traces us all back to Abraham and Sarah, the first Hebrews, who leave Ur and cross the border into Canaan. Today, if you’re a Jew who doesn’t have Jewish parents, Jewish tradition identifies you as a child of the original Hebrews, Abraham and Sarah, recognizing all converts as a children of Avraham vSarah. Every Jew is the child of border crossers. The foundation story of our peoplehood is the Exodus from Pharaoh’s Egypt, at its root also an immigrant story. Refugees from famine in Canaan, perhaps the first guest-workers in recorded history, the Israelites are oppressed, underpaid, vilified – forced to labor under the most brutal of conditions. The tragedy of Pharaoh is that he never learns to honor the labor and dignity of the immigrants who’ve built his kingdom.
And when the Jews are liberated, when we receive Torah, two rules are repeated more than any others. First, observe Shabbat. And the second, repeated 36 times: “love, respect, the immigrant among you, because you know what it was like to be an immigrant in the land of Egypt.”[3] No wonder Rabbi Yehuda’s concept of liberty means freedom of movement. That’s worth putting on a bell.
Of course, these days, “liberty” can mean lots of things. Maybe the liberty to speak freely. Or maybe the liberty to hoard firearms. Or maybe the liberty to make as much profit as possible.
In a story that’s perhaps only believable as an American story, back on April 1, 1996, Taco Bell announced in an ad campaign that it had bought the Liberty Bell — which would henceforth be known as the “Taco Liberty Bell.” According to the ads, the bell would now spend half the year on display at Taco Bell corporate headquarters, just up the road in Irvine.
The switchboard at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia was flooded with outraged callers. The Park Service scrambled to arrange a press conference, denying that the bell had been sold. After several hours, Taco Bell admitted that it was all an April Fools' joke.
When our symbols are under attack, Americans can get pretty worked up. But what about the values behind those symbols?
The Jewish migrants who first saw their Torah on that bell likely recognized in that text the freedom to move and work and live without the burden of degradation.
But for today’s Ivrim, today’s migrants, the bell rings out not for liberty, but as a warning. The Liberty Bell has been recast as an alarm bell, warning that this is a land that separates families without notice, scares our neighbors into hiding, and disappears immigrants into torture camps. Even when they’re parents. Even when they’re building cars in Georgia. Even when they’re at a health clinic in LA. Even when they show up at immigration hearing in Chicago. Even when they’re the superintendent of schools in Des Moines, Guyanese native Dr. Ian Roberts, beloved by his students, hunted down by ICE agents in his car. Even, in the case of 93% of these abductions, when they’ve committed no violent crime.[4]
We laugh in my family about Grandma Ruth. Let me tell you — she was a firecracker. One day the other girls were picking on my mother, chasing her down their Brooklyn street. Grandma Ruth wasn’t having it. She confronted the ringleader’s mother, right on the street. Police were called, and both women were taken into custody. If my immigrant grandmother was arrested today? We wouldn’t be laughing. I might never have been born here.
This moment calls to the Jewish people — now as always, an immigrant people, a people built of border-crossers — to refuse and resist. Of course, you may be saying to yourself, “that’s all well and good, Rabbi, but my ancestors came here legally. They immigrated the right way.” And it’s true that, a century ago, the US welcomed millions of immigrants, including millions of Jews. Including my ancestors. And, perhaps, yours.
Jews who came to this country and built lives and homes and corner stores and raised PhDs and orthodontists and English teachers — big beautiful families at big beautiful tables, filled with platters of gefilte fish and impossibly dense matzah balls and boxy bottles of Manischewitz.
Funny thing, though, about that Manischewitz. The kosher food empire we now know and (ahem) “love” began with a rabbi named Dov Behr, a kosher slaughterer who started a matzah factory in Cincinnati in the late nineteenth century.
Of course, Rabbi Manischewitz wasn’t born a rabbi. But as it turns out, he wasn’t born a “Manischewitz” either. His surname in his native Lithuania was “Abramson.” Family rumor has it that Rabbi Dov Baer Abramson purchased the passport of a dead man to gain passage to the US in 1888.[5] A man named Manischewitz.
Whether it’s escaping famine in the Sahara or thugs in El Salvador or Cossacks in Lithuania, people do whatever’s necessary to safeguard themselves and their families. Like leaving everything they know. Like coming to a new country to make a new life. When you’re running from Cossacks — you do what you have to. Maybe, if you have the money, you pay off a border guard. Maybe you buy a dead man’s name. Our families did what they had to. Because the alternative was unthinkable.
Our annual fundraiser is called This is Us. Jewish communities are built from the stories of our lives. I’ve spoken to some of you about the immigrant stories that brought you here, to this community. I can’t do the stories justice in this drash.I hope one day we can hear them in their fullness, and other stories like them.
Stories like that of Marlene Bellamy’s family. Marlene’s mother, Fritzi, had a picturesque childhood in Vienna, but once the Germans annexed Austria, everything changed. Anyone, from former colleagues and friends, could turn you in. The family fled to Belgium, successful only on the third try with the help of Belgian smugglers. They landed with relatives in Antwerp, then fled to Lyon, spending months in hiding, sometimes every night in a different place. When the family paid off Swiss smugglers to save them from danger in France, they were deceived by those same smugglers who took them through the frigid Alps, almost freezing to death crossing a literal glacier.
As is often the case with Latin American refugees today, the smugglers abandoned them. It was luck and savvy that allowed them to avoid the German border guards, Fritzi saved only by the frostbite she suffered in the Alps, when Swiss border guards brought her to a hospital. Otherwise, she most likely would have been deported back to certain death in France by the Swiss, who declared them illegal.
Or stories like that of Giza Braun, who was born in a displaced persons camp. When her parents, Gitl and Avraham, fled the Germans in 1940, the Russians picked them up. As they often did with refugees, they sent Giza’s parents to a labor camp in Siberia, where they survived on potato peels in the winter. Gitl lost two babies in Siberia. At the war’s end, the Russians let them go, where they were free to head back west through the “stan” countries. Like other Jewish refugees, they discovered new people living where they once did. The villagers refused to allow the Jews back in their homes.
And thus Avraham and Gitl arrived in another DP camp, Feldefink, in Germany. Tragically, Gitl would die in childbirth. Avraham had no wife, no home, and a young baby. It was only because his dead wife’s brother had connections that the family could make their way, with the help of HIAS, onto an American military ship, bound for the US.
And stories like that of Rob Tavakoli. Rob’s parents, Mahnaz and Dávid, are from Iran. In late 1978, the political atmosphere in Iran was changing. Though Dávid had served faithfully in the Iranian army, it was becoming clear that the country was becoming unsafe for Jews.
With Mahnaz in her third trimester, pregnant with Rob, the family flew to Los Angeles so that he could be a natural born US citizen — what some people would today snidely refer to as an “anchor baby.”
Dávid returned back to Iran in the hopes that the situation for Jews would improve, but then faced the reality that war with Iraq was becoming increasingly likely. He would be expected to report for duty; how a Jew would be treated in such an army was unclear. It was time to leave, and quickly.
David had a friend in the government, who got Mahmaz and baby Rob forged documents, allowing them to leave the country. On the way to the airport, Rob’s mother did not know where they were flying to — just that we were leaving.
One moving but funny, detail: The security at the airport told her she had on too much jewelry to travel with. You were only allotted two pieces — she had three. She told the security that her mother-in-law gave her the jewelry. “If you take it away,” she said, “you might as well kill me yourself.”
When we read a post online, or hear a news story, of immigrants rounded up in cities across the country, when we read gutting stories of our neighbors disappeared in the night, forcibly returned to Mexico or Guatemala and Haiti or Iran — if we even know their destination — we as Jews can’t help of think of Fritzi and Marlene, and Avraham and Gitl and Giza, and Mahnaz and Dávid and Rob, and the millions of Jews like them.
It’s why Jews in Congress take to the House floor to speak on behalf of the virtues of immigration. Like the Jewish congressman from New York who reminded opponents of immigration that, if they “had their way, and we awoke one fine morning and found all our population of foreign origin had departed… there would be no rolls for breakfast, no sugar for the coffee, and no meat for dinner — for practically all workers in” food service are immigrants.[6]
But the Jewish congressman who argued so passionately on behalf of immigrants is not currently in the House. His name is Emanuel Cellar. And he didn’t offer his remarks this year. Or last year. He made those remarks 100 years ago. And the reason Cellar took to the House floor was because of legislation then before Congress. It would come to be known as the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924.
Cellar represented a district populated with Jewish, Italian and Irish-Americans, plus African Americans who traced their roots to 17th century Dutch-colonized New Amsterdam. The Johnson-Reed Act imposed a strict quota system that kept the door wide open to immigrants from Western and Northern Europe — but severely limited immigration from Eastern Europe, and all but eliminated immigration from Asia and Africa.
Which meant that, in the years between 1933 and 1945, when Jews like Fritzi and Avraham and Gitl desperately needed a place of refuge, a place to escape the Nazi murder machine, this country was mostly closed to them.
Because, unlike the generation of legal immigrants that came before them — like my family, and maybe yours — the same people with the same lineage were now classified as “illegal immigrants.”
As Jews, we shouldn’t be fooled by sleazy rhetoric. The line — between what is legal and illegal — is not immutable. It is not set in stone. It is an arbitrary line created by human authorities. We know it’s arbitrary because, for centuries, that line was drawn across our backs. One day, you’re welcome. And the next day, your country declares you illegal. And make no mistake: where you fall on the line between legal and illegal depends, more often than not, on what you look like and what language you speak.
Today a Muslim name or a Latino accent calls your humanity into question. But in the 30s and 40s, when Jewish blood flowed in the streets of Europe, it was a Jewish name and Yiddish accent that made you undesirable.
Cellar made it his life’s work to overturn the cruelty of the Johnson-Reed Act. And in 1965, over 40 years after Johnson-Reed was passed, Congress passed the Hart-Celler Act, named in part after Emanuel Cellar. It abolished quotas based on national origin, stating: "no person shall … be discriminated against in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of the person's race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence."
This Friday, the day after Yom Kippur, will be the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Hart-Cellar Act. It should be a joyous anniversary. After all, in 1965, standing at the foot of the Statue of Liberty as he signed the bill, President Johnson said it would "repair a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice.”[7]
But today the forces of hate and rage are tearing the fabric anew, tearing parents from children. Tearing students and teachers and superintendents from their classrooms. Tearing soldiers from their battalions. Tearing communities apart, house by house, neighbor by neighbor.
Our Torah portion tomorrow will be about a shadowy ritual — the Yom Kippur sacrificial service, in which one goat is randomly given to God, and another goat is, just as randomly, laden with the sins of the people and sent to die in the wilderness. The original scapegoat.
On this day of confronting the truth, confronting our own action and inaction — let’s commit ourselves, here and now, you and me — No more. No more scapegoats sent into oblivion.No more scapegoats burdened with the fears and rage of their neighbors. No more scapegoats sacrificed in the wilderness. Whether in Lithuania or Lyon or Libya, Tehran or Turkey, San Salvador or San Diego. No more.
On the second day of Rosh HaShanah, dozens of you gathered with me to talk about where Dor Hadash should focus our efforts in the pursuit of tzedek, justice. So many of you identified this issue, the tormenting of immigrants and refugees, as a crisis. n the coming months, I invite you to join in efforts here, on the border of Latin America, to revive justice and mercy in our land.
Every day, it feels like we’re losing a little more of our sense of what it means to be an American. But we don’t have to let that be stolen from us. Never forget that we’re deserving of a safe Jewish home, and a safe American home, and that it is our Jewish sense of liberty that helped define what it means to be American.
I’m only here to give this sermon today because my Jewish migrant ancestors demanded better for themselves and their children. Perhaps you are too. We honor their lives by standing here in solidarity with today’s migrants — of all ethnicities, of all backgrounds, each one created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. No exceptions.
***
Footnotes:
[1] Leviticus 25:10
[2] Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 9b
[3] Exodus 22:20, Leviticus 19:34; there are many others.
[4] David J. Bier, “65 Percent of People Taken by ICE Had No Convictions, 93 Percent No Violent Conviction,” Cato Institute website, June 20, 2025
[5] Gil Marks, “How Manischewitz Matzo Helped Make America,” The Forward, April 18, 2011
[6] Michael Kazin, “How Trump Can Ensure Democratic Dominance for Generations,” Politico, September 1, 2015
[7] Lyndon B. Johnson, "Remarks on Signing the Immigration Bill, Liberty Island, New York, October 3, 1965," The Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum
After working all day in sweatshops, these sisters would sit at kitchen tables, late into the night, with piles of fabric, taking on extra piecemeal work. The pennies added up. My immigrant ancestors clothed a city. (Or at least a borough.) They endured painstaking daily labor to put clothing on the backs of their American neighbors.
Ruth and Rose left behind everything they know for a life of uncertainty in a strange land. They did so because this country held out the promise of opportunity, yes. But, also the promise of freedom from Jew-haters in Europe, the Cossacks that regularly assaulted our family. In one gruesome example, my grandmother, weakened by undernourishment and rickets, lay helpless in her bed while a Cossack assaulted her mother.
They came for the promise of sustenance and safety — a new home, in a new land. A land that rang a loud and clear bell for liberty. And I’m not talking a fancy metaphorical bell. There was a real bell. It was called the Liberty Bell. It even had a quote on it from Torah, from Leviticus: Ukratem dror ba’aretz, l’chol yoshveha. “Proclaim liberty throughout the land, to all the inhabitants in it.”[1]
The reason the bell’s founders wanted our text about liberty is unclear. All we know for certain is that, in 1752, Pennsylvania assembly speaker Isaac Norris asked the assembly’s agent in London, Robert Charles, to go buy a bell. His messages instructed Charles to inscribe the bell with that specific verse.
Isaac Norris may have left his motivation vague. But the rabbis in the Talmud don’t usually do vague. “Rabbi Yehudah asked: Mah lashon d’ror? What’s this word, dror, liberty?” And like a good rabbi, he answers his own question: “D’ror [refers to] a person medayyar bei dayara — who can dwell in any dwelling.” Wherever they want in the land. And, further, he adds — who can “do their business throughout the whole country.”[2] Freedom of movement — of course that would be the Jewish definition of liberty.
Jews have always known, in our guts, what it means to search, to scrimp, to scrap, to start over, to march off the edge of the map. To make a life where you can make a living.
Whether in text, or in our families’ journeys, the immigrant experience is part of the Jewish spiritual DNA. It’s in our very name. Before we were Jews or Israelites, before we spoke Yiddish or Ladino, we were Hebrews. The word in Hebrew for “Hebrew” is Ivri. It literally means “boundary-crosser.” “Border crosser.”
Torah genealogy traces us all back to Abraham and Sarah, the first Hebrews, who leave Ur and cross the border into Canaan. Today, if you’re a Jew who doesn’t have Jewish parents, Jewish tradition identifies you as a child of the original Hebrews, Abraham and Sarah, recognizing all converts as a children of Avraham vSarah. Every Jew is the child of border crossers. The foundation story of our peoplehood is the Exodus from Pharaoh’s Egypt, at its root also an immigrant story. Refugees from famine in Canaan, perhaps the first guest-workers in recorded history, the Israelites are oppressed, underpaid, vilified – forced to labor under the most brutal of conditions. The tragedy of Pharaoh is that he never learns to honor the labor and dignity of the immigrants who’ve built his kingdom.
And when the Jews are liberated, when we receive Torah, two rules are repeated more than any others. First, observe Shabbat. And the second, repeated 36 times: “love, respect, the immigrant among you, because you know what it was like to be an immigrant in the land of Egypt.”[3] No wonder Rabbi Yehuda’s concept of liberty means freedom of movement. That’s worth putting on a bell.
Of course, these days, “liberty” can mean lots of things. Maybe the liberty to speak freely. Or maybe the liberty to hoard firearms. Or maybe the liberty to make as much profit as possible.
In a story that’s perhaps only believable as an American story, back on April 1, 1996, Taco Bell announced in an ad campaign that it had bought the Liberty Bell — which would henceforth be known as the “Taco Liberty Bell.” According to the ads, the bell would now spend half the year on display at Taco Bell corporate headquarters, just up the road in Irvine.
The switchboard at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia was flooded with outraged callers. The Park Service scrambled to arrange a press conference, denying that the bell had been sold. After several hours, Taco Bell admitted that it was all an April Fools' joke.
When our symbols are under attack, Americans can get pretty worked up. But what about the values behind those symbols?
The Jewish migrants who first saw their Torah on that bell likely recognized in that text the freedom to move and work and live without the burden of degradation.
But for today’s Ivrim, today’s migrants, the bell rings out not for liberty, but as a warning. The Liberty Bell has been recast as an alarm bell, warning that this is a land that separates families without notice, scares our neighbors into hiding, and disappears immigrants into torture camps. Even when they’re parents. Even when they’re building cars in Georgia. Even when they’re at a health clinic in LA. Even when they show up at immigration hearing in Chicago. Even when they’re the superintendent of schools in Des Moines, Guyanese native Dr. Ian Roberts, beloved by his students, hunted down by ICE agents in his car. Even, in the case of 93% of these abductions, when they’ve committed no violent crime.[4]
We laugh in my family about Grandma Ruth. Let me tell you — she was a firecracker. One day the other girls were picking on my mother, chasing her down their Brooklyn street. Grandma Ruth wasn’t having it. She confronted the ringleader’s mother, right on the street. Police were called, and both women were taken into custody. If my immigrant grandmother was arrested today? We wouldn’t be laughing. I might never have been born here.
This moment calls to the Jewish people — now as always, an immigrant people, a people built of border-crossers — to refuse and resist. Of course, you may be saying to yourself, “that’s all well and good, Rabbi, but my ancestors came here legally. They immigrated the right way.” And it’s true that, a century ago, the US welcomed millions of immigrants, including millions of Jews. Including my ancestors. And, perhaps, yours.
Jews who came to this country and built lives and homes and corner stores and raised PhDs and orthodontists and English teachers — big beautiful families at big beautiful tables, filled with platters of gefilte fish and impossibly dense matzah balls and boxy bottles of Manischewitz.
Funny thing, though, about that Manischewitz. The kosher food empire we now know and (ahem) “love” began with a rabbi named Dov Behr, a kosher slaughterer who started a matzah factory in Cincinnati in the late nineteenth century.
Of course, Rabbi Manischewitz wasn’t born a rabbi. But as it turns out, he wasn’t born a “Manischewitz” either. His surname in his native Lithuania was “Abramson.” Family rumor has it that Rabbi Dov Baer Abramson purchased the passport of a dead man to gain passage to the US in 1888.[5] A man named Manischewitz.
Whether it’s escaping famine in the Sahara or thugs in El Salvador or Cossacks in Lithuania, people do whatever’s necessary to safeguard themselves and their families. Like leaving everything they know. Like coming to a new country to make a new life. When you’re running from Cossacks — you do what you have to. Maybe, if you have the money, you pay off a border guard. Maybe you buy a dead man’s name. Our families did what they had to. Because the alternative was unthinkable.
Our annual fundraiser is called This is Us. Jewish communities are built from the stories of our lives. I’ve spoken to some of you about the immigrant stories that brought you here, to this community. I can’t do the stories justice in this drash.I hope one day we can hear them in their fullness, and other stories like them.
Stories like that of Marlene Bellamy’s family. Marlene’s mother, Fritzi, had a picturesque childhood in Vienna, but once the Germans annexed Austria, everything changed. Anyone, from former colleagues and friends, could turn you in. The family fled to Belgium, successful only on the third try with the help of Belgian smugglers. They landed with relatives in Antwerp, then fled to Lyon, spending months in hiding, sometimes every night in a different place. When the family paid off Swiss smugglers to save them from danger in France, they were deceived by those same smugglers who took them through the frigid Alps, almost freezing to death crossing a literal glacier.
As is often the case with Latin American refugees today, the smugglers abandoned them. It was luck and savvy that allowed them to avoid the German border guards, Fritzi saved only by the frostbite she suffered in the Alps, when Swiss border guards brought her to a hospital. Otherwise, she most likely would have been deported back to certain death in France by the Swiss, who declared them illegal.
Or stories like that of Giza Braun, who was born in a displaced persons camp. When her parents, Gitl and Avraham, fled the Germans in 1940, the Russians picked them up. As they often did with refugees, they sent Giza’s parents to a labor camp in Siberia, where they survived on potato peels in the winter. Gitl lost two babies in Siberia. At the war’s end, the Russians let them go, where they were free to head back west through the “stan” countries. Like other Jewish refugees, they discovered new people living where they once did. The villagers refused to allow the Jews back in their homes.
And thus Avraham and Gitl arrived in another DP camp, Feldefink, in Germany. Tragically, Gitl would die in childbirth. Avraham had no wife, no home, and a young baby. It was only because his dead wife’s brother had connections that the family could make their way, with the help of HIAS, onto an American military ship, bound for the US.
And stories like that of Rob Tavakoli. Rob’s parents, Mahnaz and Dávid, are from Iran. In late 1978, the political atmosphere in Iran was changing. Though Dávid had served faithfully in the Iranian army, it was becoming clear that the country was becoming unsafe for Jews.
With Mahnaz in her third trimester, pregnant with Rob, the family flew to Los Angeles so that he could be a natural born US citizen — what some people would today snidely refer to as an “anchor baby.”
Dávid returned back to Iran in the hopes that the situation for Jews would improve, but then faced the reality that war with Iraq was becoming increasingly likely. He would be expected to report for duty; how a Jew would be treated in such an army was unclear. It was time to leave, and quickly.
David had a friend in the government, who got Mahmaz and baby Rob forged documents, allowing them to leave the country. On the way to the airport, Rob’s mother did not know where they were flying to — just that we were leaving.
One moving but funny, detail: The security at the airport told her she had on too much jewelry to travel with. You were only allotted two pieces — she had three. She told the security that her mother-in-law gave her the jewelry. “If you take it away,” she said, “you might as well kill me yourself.”
When we read a post online, or hear a news story, of immigrants rounded up in cities across the country, when we read gutting stories of our neighbors disappeared in the night, forcibly returned to Mexico or Guatemala and Haiti or Iran — if we even know their destination — we as Jews can’t help of think of Fritzi and Marlene, and Avraham and Gitl and Giza, and Mahnaz and Dávid and Rob, and the millions of Jews like them.
It’s why Jews in Congress take to the House floor to speak on behalf of the virtues of immigration. Like the Jewish congressman from New York who reminded opponents of immigration that, if they “had their way, and we awoke one fine morning and found all our population of foreign origin had departed… there would be no rolls for breakfast, no sugar for the coffee, and no meat for dinner — for practically all workers in” food service are immigrants.[6]
But the Jewish congressman who argued so passionately on behalf of immigrants is not currently in the House. His name is Emanuel Cellar. And he didn’t offer his remarks this year. Or last year. He made those remarks 100 years ago. And the reason Cellar took to the House floor was because of legislation then before Congress. It would come to be known as the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924.
Cellar represented a district populated with Jewish, Italian and Irish-Americans, plus African Americans who traced their roots to 17th century Dutch-colonized New Amsterdam. The Johnson-Reed Act imposed a strict quota system that kept the door wide open to immigrants from Western and Northern Europe — but severely limited immigration from Eastern Europe, and all but eliminated immigration from Asia and Africa.
Which meant that, in the years between 1933 and 1945, when Jews like Fritzi and Avraham and Gitl desperately needed a place of refuge, a place to escape the Nazi murder machine, this country was mostly closed to them.
Because, unlike the generation of legal immigrants that came before them — like my family, and maybe yours — the same people with the same lineage were now classified as “illegal immigrants.”
As Jews, we shouldn’t be fooled by sleazy rhetoric. The line — between what is legal and illegal — is not immutable. It is not set in stone. It is an arbitrary line created by human authorities. We know it’s arbitrary because, for centuries, that line was drawn across our backs. One day, you’re welcome. And the next day, your country declares you illegal. And make no mistake: where you fall on the line between legal and illegal depends, more often than not, on what you look like and what language you speak.
Today a Muslim name or a Latino accent calls your humanity into question. But in the 30s and 40s, when Jewish blood flowed in the streets of Europe, it was a Jewish name and Yiddish accent that made you undesirable.
Cellar made it his life’s work to overturn the cruelty of the Johnson-Reed Act. And in 1965, over 40 years after Johnson-Reed was passed, Congress passed the Hart-Celler Act, named in part after Emanuel Cellar. It abolished quotas based on national origin, stating: "no person shall … be discriminated against in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of the person's race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence."
This Friday, the day after Yom Kippur, will be the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Hart-Cellar Act. It should be a joyous anniversary. After all, in 1965, standing at the foot of the Statue of Liberty as he signed the bill, President Johnson said it would "repair a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice.”[7]
But today the forces of hate and rage are tearing the fabric anew, tearing parents from children. Tearing students and teachers and superintendents from their classrooms. Tearing soldiers from their battalions. Tearing communities apart, house by house, neighbor by neighbor.
Our Torah portion tomorrow will be about a shadowy ritual — the Yom Kippur sacrificial service, in which one goat is randomly given to God, and another goat is, just as randomly, laden with the sins of the people and sent to die in the wilderness. The original scapegoat.
On this day of confronting the truth, confronting our own action and inaction — let’s commit ourselves, here and now, you and me — No more. No more scapegoats sent into oblivion.No more scapegoats burdened with the fears and rage of their neighbors. No more scapegoats sacrificed in the wilderness. Whether in Lithuania or Lyon or Libya, Tehran or Turkey, San Salvador or San Diego. No more.
On the second day of Rosh HaShanah, dozens of you gathered with me to talk about where Dor Hadash should focus our efforts in the pursuit of tzedek, justice. So many of you identified this issue, the tormenting of immigrants and refugees, as a crisis. n the coming months, I invite you to join in efforts here, on the border of Latin America, to revive justice and mercy in our land.
Every day, it feels like we’re losing a little more of our sense of what it means to be an American. But we don’t have to let that be stolen from us. Never forget that we’re deserving of a safe Jewish home, and a safe American home, and that it is our Jewish sense of liberty that helped define what it means to be American.
I’m only here to give this sermon today because my Jewish migrant ancestors demanded better for themselves and their children. Perhaps you are too. We honor their lives by standing here in solidarity with today’s migrants — of all ethnicities, of all backgrounds, each one created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. No exceptions.
***
Footnotes:
[1] Leviticus 25:10
[2] Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 9b
[3] Exodus 22:20, Leviticus 19:34; there are many others.
[4] David J. Bier, “65 Percent of People Taken by ICE Had No Convictions, 93 Percent No Violent Conviction,” Cato Institute website, June 20, 2025
[5] Gil Marks, “How Manischewitz Matzo Helped Make America,” The Forward, April 18, 2011
[6] Michael Kazin, “How Trump Can Ensure Democratic Dominance for Generations,” Politico, September 1, 2015
[7] Lyndon B. Johnson, "Remarks on Signing the Immigration Bill, Liberty Island, New York, October 3, 1965," The Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum