Remembering one’s group suffering is more likely to predispose you to take care to preserve your group rather than to expend resources to help your enemies. Israel, for instance, has no desire to take in these Syrian migrants.
I wonder how many Jews who helped Muslim refugees will eventually get raped and murdered by Muslim refugees?
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Recalling their expulsion from Arab lands and horrors of the Holocaust, communities are helping a new wave of migrants in search of a better life
MILAN — Located on the frontline of the immigration crisis, for many in Italy’s Jewish communities, the horrifying images of migrants and refugees washing up on the country’s shores over the past few weeks have evoked memories of a terrible past. Not so long ago, many Italian Jews were refugees themselves.
The Italian communities, decimated by the Holocaust, were bolstered by Jewish refugees from Arab countries who were forced to leave their homes in 1948, 1956 and 1967.
And for the past several months, as Germans and Austrians welcomed a flood of refugees coming across their borders over the weekend, a similar scenario on a somewhat smaller scale is playing out in southern Europe. According to an AP report, Italy has nearly 120,000 people who were brought to its shores after rescue at sea and who are hoping for asylum in Europe. Untold others died in transit.
Many of Italy’s Jews, aware of the similarities in their own communal fates, are deliberating their next steps, or already actively working to aid the influx of migrants.
Among them is Milo Hasbani, one of the presidents of the Jewish Community of Milan.
“Doing something for these migrants is very important to us, also considering that so many members of our community fled Arab countries and found a better life in Italy,” Hasbani said, recalling how he himself left Lebanon with his family in 1956 when he was only 8.
And so in Milan, when a small group of Africans sought shelter, they found it in a rather fitting site — the city’s Holocaust Memorial.
Fleeing war and poverty, 35 women and 7 children, mostly from Eritrea, found safety this weekend underneath the city’s train station to the memorial that commemorates Italian Jews who were deported to Auschwitz. The memorial stands on notorious platform 21, which during World War II was used to secretly load trains to deport Jews to the death camps.
Since the beginning of the summer, part of the Holocaust memorial has served as a shelter to hundreds of migrants from Africa and the Middle East as they anxiously wait for trains to take them to northern Europe. Over 2,500 migrants have been accommodated so far, thanks to the efforts of the Foundation for the Memorial, whose members, among others, include the Jewish Community of Milan, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI) and the Catholic organization Sant’Egidio, whose volunteers run the shelter.
