I am in Los Angeles as I write this, at the home of my former Israeli dance partner, Reva Sober. Joe and I have been visiting friends in San Francisco and Los Angeles since July 31. Last night began the fast day of Tisha B'Av, a day commemorating the destruction of the first and second temples in Jerusalem, and many other tragedies for the Jewish people, like the expulsion from Spain in August 1492, or the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto during The Holocaust. Joe fasts; I don't.
We attended services last night at Beth Chayim Chadashim, a mile down Pico Boulevard from where we are staying, and the place where we met just eleven years ago. We were asked during the service to write about something that made us sad - perhaps a news article we had read, or something personal. A few people read these out loud. My friend Ilene Cohen said she was worried about refugees, people who can't stay where they are, but may not have a place to go. We were supposed to add something personal to that, and Ilene did. I had also written about refugees as something that made me sad. Not just sad, but frightened.
My ancestors left Czarist Russia between 1886 and 1906. My father's parents, second cousins, came from Belchatow, now in Poland. My mother's family lived in present-day Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. There were pogroms at the times they came, where Jews were beaten and robbed, at least, often with the cooperation of the local police. Jews who stayed in Europe, including family members, were murdered by the Germans in the decade before I was born. I don't know of any relatives in Europe.
I lived here in Los Angeles between 1984 and 2010. Refugees from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua came into Los Angeles in droves. People came from The Philipines, Jews from Russia and Iran, Armenians, Chinese and Vietnamese. I knew illegal aliens, but they were middle- class Jewish people from Israel, South Africa and Argentina. There were backlashes against the poorer, darker refugees, and the border was shut, until employers complained that they couldn't find workers. What they meant, of course, was that they couldn't find workers to work for low wages..
I felt like I was seeing New York, where my ancestors arrived a hundred years earlier. People would complain about "short, dark people with eight children" crowding Los Angeles, and I wondered if people in New York a century earlier had talked about my great-grandmother, also short and dark and with eight children. I would see people lined up at Virgil Junior High to take English at night and remember that my mother's father's parents met in an English night school class. I still hear people say "Why don't these people learn English?" and I remember that my mother told me that her grandmother lived here sixty years and never learned English. Bubbie Glekel was married at sixteen, had two boys, and at twenty-four took them (ages three and six) to the boat to America to meet her husband, who came here first. That great-grandmother died when I was five, and I have only dim memories of her.
I've been hearing for the last year about a backlash in America against refugees coming here, particularly from Syria. Congress won't pass a reform of immigration laws, and people can be sent back to dangerous places in Mexico and Central America, separating them from their families.
Imagine living in a country where ISIS, Al-Queda and your own corrupt government are fighting, where Iran and Saudi Arabia are trying to exert control, as well as the United States and Russia. The cruelty of what goes on there is horrifying, and we in the United States have no power but to accept refugees from the war-torn Middle East.
Of course, we are not the only country that needs to be more compassionate. I am always loathe to criticize Israel, but there are African refugees locked up there, and foreigners, if they lose their jobs, can be deported. And I read this week about asylum-seekers trying to reach Australia, who are locked away in camps in Pacific Island nations.
This is our seventh day in Los Angeles on this trip. We are in a neighborhood where many Orthodox Jews live, American-born but also from Israel and Iran. We have eaten twice at my favorite venue in Los Angeles, The Farmers' Marrket in the Fairfax District. One hears Spanish and French, Chinese and Vietnamese, Hebrew, Arabic, Armenian and Farsi there.
I know that Los Angeles is not necessarily an ideal society. In my years working in public schools here, there were often clashes between ethnic groups, and income inequality is possibly worse here than anywhere in the United States. Still, I believe this town is less racist, more accepting of differences, than other places I have lived in or visited.
We have a spacious country. We can help people who are desperate, and still work to bring about more just and stable societies, including our own.
My prayer for Tisha B'Av is that refugees throughout the world will find a place where they can live peacefully and prosper, as my ancestors were able to do in the United States. May it come to pass, speedily and in our time.
For my grandparents, Issachar Wenglinsky and Feigie Sadowsky (Sam and Anna Wendell) and Y'hoshua Poliakoff and Chaika Glekel (Samuel Joseph and Irma Polk). 10 Av 5776- 14 August 2016
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