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A death knell for the American Jewish dream of a melting pot — in the 1920s, and today
“You are declaring the incapacity of America to Americanize.”
So said Rabbi Stephen S. Wise before the House immigration committee in January 1924. Wise, whose family immigrated to the United States from Budapest in his infancy, was one of several Jewish leaders to appear in front of the committee to argue against restrictive limits on immigration from southern and eastern Europe.
Imposing these quotas — which had a particularly deleterious effect on Eastern European Jews seeking a life of greater opportunity and less antisemitism in the U.S. — showed “a want of faith in America,” he said.
I thought about Wise’s charge to this country’s leaders while reading about the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society shuttering its operations in Vienna this week. That closure is just one more consequence of President Donald Trump’s halting of the U.S. refugee program — which he suspended on the first day of his second term, and which remains in limbo one year later — and termination of the grant that funded HIAS’ Resettlement Support Center in Austria.
According to HIAS, the decision will leave more than 14,000 religious minorities in Iran who have already been vetted and approved for resettlement, including hundreds of Jews, in immigration purgatory.
I thought of Wise and how lazily history is repeating itself. The arguments that fueled Trump’s decision to end refugee entry to the U.S. — we can only let in those who can assimilate; it’s a matter of national security to do otherwise — could have been copied from the headlines of a century ago.
Why is the United States doing this, once again?
Because now, as before, our leaders don’t actually want America to Americanize. They want us to believe this country can’t survive taking in people who will both change and be changed by it. And they still fail to see the wisdom in Wise’s vision of a country that becomes more itself with every immigrant — a vision that many Jews still believe in, even as a very prominent Jewish man in the Trump administration strives to snuff it out.
When Wise spoke to Congress, the language of assimilation and national security was, like today, being used to obscure racism. In 1922, the eugenicist American educator Harry Laughlin presented a report to the House Immigration Committee in which he asserted that “the recent immigrants, as a whole, present a higher percentage of inborn socially inadequate qualities than do the older stocks.”
That report, as Jia Lynn Yang recounts in One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, was quoted in papers across the country. One, the Saturday Evening Post, elaborated on Laughlin’s analysis: “If the farmer doesn’t keep out the weeds by his own toil, his crops will be choked and stunted,” a lead story in that publication read. “If America doesn’t keep out the queer, alien, mongrelized people of Southeastern Europe, her crop of citizens will eventually be dwarfed and mongrelized in turn.”
The banging of the drum against Italian and Jewish immigrants in particular had been crescendoing for years.
In 1911, Charles Davenport wrote that Jews from eastern Europe had “intense individualism and ideals of gain at the cost of any interest,” and that if allowed to mix in the U.S., they and Italians would make Americans “darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial… more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape, and sex-immorality.”
The ability to assimilate was then, and is still, held up as some immutable, objective good, and failure to fully do so as dangerous. It is no accident that Trump has framed his immigration crackdown — which has involved the arrest of some 75,000 people with no criminal record — as ridding the streets of “killers, rapists, and drug dealers.”
There are clear costs to the belief that our national security is so fragile that an Italian or Iranian family could be fatal to it.
The Jews who could not come here for a better, safer life a century ago because of the immigration restrictions against which Wise protested remained in Europe. Many of them died there during the Holocaust, precisely because they could not come here.
The U.S. tried to make belated amends after World War II, welcoming hundreds of Holocaust survivors. The same HIAS office in Vienna that closed this week helped in that effort, resettling around 150,000 Holocaust survivors in the U.S. and elsewhere. It did the same for hundreds of thousands of Jews from the former Soviet Union, then for tens of thousands of religious minorities from Iran over the past two decades.
If, in the future, this country has the chance to once again make amends for closing in on itself, who will be left to do the same?
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The Yiddishist Yeshiva is open for registration
ס׳האָט זיך לעצטנס געשאַפֿן אַ נײַער סאָרט לייענקרײַז דורך פֿייסבוק, וווּ מע לערנט תּורה אויף ייִדיש צוזאַמען.
אינעם לייענקרײַז, וואָס הייסט „די ייִדישיסטישע ישיבֿה“, לייענט מען חומש מיט רש״י — סײַ אויפֿן אָריגינעלן לשון־קודש סײַ אויף ייִדיש־טײַטש. „די גרופּע איז אָפֿן פֿאַר אַלע מינים מענטשן,“ האָט דערקלערט דער לינגוויסט און ייִדיש־אַקטיוויסט לייזער בורקאָ, וועלכער האָט אָרגאַניזירט די גרופּע. „פֿרויען און מענער, ייִדן און נישט־ייִדן, געי און ׳גלײַך׳. נײַע תּלמידים דאַרפֿן פֿאַרשטיין ייִדיש גוט, אָבער זיי דאַרפֿן נישט האָבן קיין תּורהדיקן הינטערגרונט.“
די גרופּע טרעפֿט זיך יעדן דינסטיק דורך פֿייסבוק. נאָך מער פּרטים אָדער כּדי זיך צו פֿאַרשרײַבן, שטעלט זיך אין קאָנטאַקט מיט בורקאָ, אויפֿן אַדרעס leyzertag@gmail.com אָדער דורך פֿייסבוק.
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A century-old Jerusalem photo album sparks search for forgotten images of the Western Wall
(JTA) — When David Freedman discovered a long-forgotten photo album in his parents’ Montreal basement last year, he found nearly 100 pages of century-old photographs from his grandfather’s year in British Mandate Palestine, capturing Jerusalem street scenes, market stalls and holy sites.
The photographs were not only century-old and in near-perfect condition, but included figures who would later become central to Jewish medical and political history, among them Israel’s future first president Chaim Weizmann, Jerusalem ophthalmologist Abraham Ticho, malaria researcher Israel Kligler, future British prime minister Winston Churchill and Herbert Samuel, Britain’s first high commissioner for Palestine.
David Freedman said he knew he had “struck gold” when he found the album, which had been untouched for decades. “I realized in disbelief I was looking at extraordinary images of Jerusalem,” he said.
Though Freedman said the album showed his grandfather’s “passion for skillful, impromptu photography,” it was images of a site that epitomizes endurance that are having the broadest impact.
Freedman’s pictures of the Western Wall has inspired a public appeal by the Tower of David Jerusalem Museum, which is asking people to look through old albums and attics for photographs, postcards and other visual material that could help expand the historical record of Judaism’s holiest site.
The request comes ahead of a major exhibition opening in 2027 marking 60 years since the 1967 Six-Day War brought the wall, known in Hebrew as the Kotel, under Jewish control for the first time in nearly two millennia.
Although the Western Wall is now one of the most photographed sites in the world, museum curators say the visual record of earlier decades remains surprisingly fragmented, with many of the most intimate images likely still tucked away in private collections and family albums.
“The Western Wall, the Kotel, in its simplest form, is a structure of ancient stones. Yet its true meaning has never resided in the stones alone — it has been shaped and elevated by the countless individuals who have stood before it over the centuries,” Eilat Lieber, the museum’s director and chief curator, said in a statement.
Next year’s exhibition, titled “Eyes on the Wall” and curated by Shimon Lev and Yael Brandt, will be the first large-scale exhibition dedicated entirely to the Western Wall, the museum said, and will trace its transformation over nearly 2,000 years. It will be one of the major exhibitions staged by the Tower of David Museum since it reopened in 2023 after a $50 million renovation of its ancient citadel complex.
The wall, the exposed section of an ancient retaining wall around the Temple Mount, the site of the biblical Jewish temples, has long been Judaism’s most sacred places of prayer and pilgrimage. From 1948 until the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel captured the Old City and East Jerusalem from Jordan, Jews were barred from going there.
Among its most iconic images was David Rubinger’s photograph of three Israeli paratroopers standing at the wall shortly after its capture, looking upward in a mixture of awe and disbelief. The picture was taken 59 years ago this week.
Abraham Orkin Freedman, a Canadian physician and Zionist activist, took his photographs before the site was so contested. He arrived in Palestine in July 1920, just as Britain was replacing military rule with a civil administration, and stayed until 1922, serving during that period as managing director of Hadassah Hospital. His grandson David, also a doctor, said the album’s timing gives it much of its historical value, with photographs that capture people in the streets, as well as the terrain and buildings of Jerusalem during the nascent years of the British Mandate.
Among the images Freedman uncovered, the one that struck him most was a photograph of women praying side by side with men at the oldest part of the Western Wall, a scene far removed from the gender-separated prayer sections at the site today. The question of mixed-gender prayer at the Wall remains politically charged, with a recent High Court order to advance the egalitarian section followed by Knesset moves to strengthen Chief Rabbinate control over prayer at the site.
After recognizing the album’s significance, Freedman met with his family who decided collectively to give it to the Tower of David Jerusalem Museum for safekeeping, research and public access. Freedman said the family was proud the album had found “a new home, not many meters from where my grandfather once stood.”
Lev said he hoped the appeal would bring more discoveries like Freedman’s into public view, expanding the visual record of the Western Wall beyond official archives.
“There is something profoundly moving in the moment when an intimate private photograph transcends its original purpose and becomes an important historical testimony,” Lev said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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5th man charged in March arson of London’s Hatzola ambulances
(JTA) — Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service announced Tuesday that an 18-year-old man has been charged in connection with the March arson attack that destroyed four ambulances owned by Hatzola, a Jewish volunteer emergency service.
Subhan Ahmed, a British national, was charged on Monday with “assisting an offender” in connection with the arson.
The ambulances were set ablaze in the early morning of March 23 in Golders Green, a heavily Jewish neighborhood in London. The incident spurred increased patrols in Jewish communities.
The charge is the latest development in an investigation being led by the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism unit.
Four others have already been charged in connection with the attack.
Three British nationals — 20-year-old Hamza Iqbal, 19-year-old Rehan Khan and 18-year-old Judex Atshatshi — along with a 17-year-old dual British and Pakistani national were all charged in April with “committing arson, destroying or damaging property, and being reckless as to whether life would be endangered.”
The four have remained in custody ahead of a trial planned for January. Ahmed, meanwhile, was released ahead of a June 16 court date.
The ambulance arsons came at the early edge of a wave of incidents that have put London Jews on edge and induced the city’s police force to step up their presence in Jewish communities. The incidents have included multiple incendiary devices placed near synagogues as well as the stabbing in April of two Jewish men in Golders Green. The Metropolitan Police reported last week that antisemitic hate crimes in the capital rose 72% in May.
Following the announcement of Ahmed’s charge, the Community Security Trust, a Jewish organization, thanked the police and the Crown Prosecution Service “for their ongoing work investigating this attack and other arson incidents targeting the Jewish community.”
It added in a statement, “These are very serious allegations, and it is right that those responsible are being held accountable.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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