Jews don’t want Muslim immigrants, Jewish elites do. How many Jews and gentiles will be slaughtered by these Muslim migrants?
Nathan Guttman writes: At the end of her Rosh Hashanah sermon, Rabbi Elyse Frishman turned to congregants and asked them to take out their cell phones and start dialing. An unusual scene at the sanctuary, and even more so during a High Holiday service, but Frishman explained that on this day, the cell phone would serve as a shofar and direct the community’s pleadings — not to God but to the White House.
The calls conducted by hundreds of members of the Barnert Temple in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, carried a clear request to President Obama: Take immediate steps to help Syrian refugees fleeing their war-torn country.
“People came up to me and told me how their families were refugees, too, and how they wouldn’t have been here today had America not let their parents or grandparents in,” Frishman said. “That was so deeply powerful.”
It is yet another sign that the Jewish community is waking up to the Syrian refugee crisis.
Like many around the world, it took a horrifying image of a dead toddler washed to the shore and throngs of migrants reaching Europe’s doorstep to draw attention to the Syrian civil war, which has driven 4 million Syrians out of their homeland.
“Until recently, not enough has been done by the Jewish community,” said Georgette Bennett, founder of the Multifaith Alliance for Syrian Refugees, a coalition that includes many Jewish organizations. “But I believe now we will see a much greater response, because that photograph really galvanized the world.”
For the Jewish community, this sudden shift is being articulated in calls on the administration and Congress to open America’s doors to more Syrian refugees and to prioritize resolution of the Syrian conflict. There are now urgent campaigns to raise funds for humanitarian relief programs carried out on the ground in Syrian refugee concentrations.
“There has been a tremendous sea change in the Jewish community,” said Rabbi Jennie Rosenn, vice president for community engagement at HIAS.
HIAS, the Jewish community’s largest refugee resettlement organization, has been reaching out to communal leaders for months in an attempt to pique their interest in the Syrian refugees’ plight, Rosenn explained. But she says that now the dynamic has changed: “The Jewish community is reaching out to us and looking for ways to get involved.”
For some rabbis, this change came just as they were putting the final touches on their Rosh Hashanah sermons.
“A group of Reform rabbis started to ask questions about this on Facebook,” recalled Rabbi Daniel Gropper of Community Synagogue of Rye. They eventually decided to use the image of the shofar, replacing it with a cell phone to advocate on behalf of the refugees. At Gropper’s synagogue, congregants were asked to go online and sign a petition asking Obama to increase refugee resettlement quotas.
In his sermon, Gropper tied the struggle for Syrian refugees to the battle the Jewish community has just waged for and against the Iranian nuclear deal. “All the fighting over the Iran deal has tarnished the luster of the Jewish community, especially among younger members, and this will help us get back some of this luster,” he said.
“The Jewish people want to be a light unto the nations,” said Rabbi Jonah Pesner, who heads the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. He said the response among rabbis and congregants has been overwhelming and that many are taking on the cause as a moral Jewish issue. “We all want to show that we are a beacon of hope,” Pesner said.
On a practical level, several initiatives now dominate the communal response to the Syrian refugee crisis.
Key to these efforts is an organized call to allow 100,000 Syrian refugees into the United States next year. This figure exceeds the offer, put forward by Obama, of absorbing 15,000 additional Syrian refugees next year, and 15,000 more above that in 2017, for a total of 45,000 additional refugees from Syria than would otherwise have been admitted within two years. HIAS described this offer as no more than a “nice symbolic gesture.”
The group’s plea is also larger than the UN Refugee Agency’s request that America take in 65,000 Syrians. But it still pales in the face of the estimated million Syrian migrants already at Europe’s gates.
Obama is expected to make a final determination on the quota for Syrian refugees by the end of September.
Jewish groups hope that petitions and calls to the White House convince the administration to enact a larger increase. But energizing a community that has just now ended its largest political mobilization in years over the Iran deal could be a formidable task. Adding another layer of difficulty is the fact that some in the community have mixed feelings about allowing citizens of a country hostile to Israel into the United States, some of whom carry this hostility with them even after fleeing Syria.
“People told me, ‘Rabbi, you are totally naive,’” Frishman said, describing how some in her community criticized her for promoting an increase in admission quotas for citizens of a country at war with Israel.
Mark Hetfield, president and CEO of HIAS, said that increasing quotas to include an extra 100,000 Syrian refugees may sound like a big step, but it is clearly a mission America can undertake…
In fact, the security issues here are much different from those in Europe, where there is scant opportunity to screen masses of refugees already entering through the continent’s borders.
Syrian refugees up for resettlement in America will come from the camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. Separated from the Middle East by an ocean, the United States has the opportunity to rigorously vet every Syrian seeking refuge on its shores. Activists believe that if pressure is relieved in the Middle East refugee camps, there will be less of a push for refugees to embark on the dangerous and difficult journey to Europe. But this vetting process, Jewish activists say, is at times actually way too rigorous.
WASHINGTON — The FBI does not have a way to properly vet incoming Syrian refugees and the Federal Bureau of Investigation said so at a House Homeland Security committee hearing in February.
Officials from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), FBI and the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) told committee members that an intelligence gap exists about terrorists who joined the fight in the civil war happening in Syria and that more than 20,000 foreign fighters have joined the conflict.
“We don’t have it under control,” Mr. Michael Steinback, Assistant Director for the FBI told the committee. “Absolutely, we’re doing the best we can. If I were to say that we had it under control, then I would say I know of every single individual traveling. I don’t. And I don’t know every person there and I don’t know everyone coming back. So it’s not even close to being under control.”
Texas Republican Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the Homeland Security committee, asked if the agencies present concurred that “bringing in Syrian refugees pose a greater risk to Americans?”
“Yes, I’m concerned,” said Steinback. “We’ll have to go take a look at those lists and go through all of those intelligence holdings and be very careful to try and identify connections to foreign terrorist groups.”
McCaul, along with Subcommittee Chairmen Peter King, R-N.Y., and Candice Miller, R-Mich., previously sent a letter to the White House on the Syrian refugee plan.
“Screening these refugees is not a task to be taken lightly,” McCaul and others wrote to the president at the time. “As we saw with previous Iraqi refugees…the lack of a thorough security screening process can result in individuals with terrorist ties exploiting the refugee program to resettle in the U.S. homeland.”
Not all Republicans are siding with McCaul and Republicans on his committee. Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham as well as Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain both wants Syrian refugees to come to the United States as refugees.
When asked about the shallow vetting the refugees receive, Graham told The Daily Caller Thursday, “All I can tell you is one thing I won’t do is turn my back on these people. There’s risk to anything you do. At the end of the day I’m not worried about radical Islam coming here. They’re already here.”
He added, “I’m not gonna turn my back on people who are in desperate straits because it’s possible that somebody could get through. Yes, it’s possible. We could turn our back on everybody. That’s exactly what happened to the Jews. We’re not gonna do that again.”
However, McCaul warned Thursday, that ISIS wants to use the refugee crisis as a method to sneak into western countries.
“The Ppresident wants to surge thousands of Syrian refugees into the United States, in spite of consistent intelligence community and federal law enforcement warnings that we do not have the intelligence needed to vet individuals from the conflict zone. We also know that ISIS wants to use refugee routes as cover to sneak operatives into the West,” he said in a statement.
“I implore the president to consult with Congress before taking any drastic action and to level with the American people about the very real security challenges we face.”
LINK: “NumbersUSA has called for passage of Rep. Brian Babin’s (R-Texas) Resettlement Accountability National Security Act, H.R.3314, that would immediately suspend the refugee resettlement program in the United States until the Government Accountability Office can further examine its costs and potential threats to national security. In the meantime, NumbersUSA and other leaders, including Virginia Senator and former Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine have called for the establishment of refugee camps closer to the region.”
Comments posted on the Forward article:
* I think “rabbi” Elyse should personally take in six of them and let them sleep in her house. This is a case of someone being a hero with someone else’s a$$.
* Being a light unto the nations does not mean being blinded by the glare of a warped sense of responsibility to groups that unlike our ancestors, who eagerly sought to become Americanized, now want to convert this country into yet another following Sharia. I have neighbors who are Moslems from Iraq, from Jerusalem, from Judea and Samaria who make no bones about resenting this country – even tho we saved their butts, Stop providing a vicious fifth column. Stop this silent jihad. Stop the terribly misguided resettlement of these individuals. Send them to Saudi Arabia and the other wealthy Moslem countries who have so far refused entry to their countrymen.
* No one in his right mind would want people who hate you, despise you and want to kill you and your co-religionists to come here to America or even Europe.
The Syrians are brought up on hate. They are the most primitive and cruel of all the Arabs. Do you know what they did to Israeli POW’s in 1973 and before that. They don’t respect human life, much less Jewish life.
This is like welcoming former SS Nazis to come live next to me in America.
* “rabbi” Elyse Frishman. A rabbi who uses Anat Hoffman as a translator since she can’t speak Hebrew. Even Anat laughs at her.
* Why stop at 100,000. Why not 10 million. 50 million. Lets get a 100 million people in here that want to exterminate Israel and burn down my synagogue, And abrogate the constitution. What could go wrong.
* So these Reform Rabbis are lobbying to enable thousands of Syrians to come into our country, hoping it will establish “Jews are cool” to make up for the coolness we lost by lobbying against the Iranian deal? ok, got it. Because the Iranian deal is so great. And bringing in a group that hates women and gays – what could go wrong?
* Another asinine liberal idea. Last summer, in obvious response to “Operation Protective Edge”, Israel’s assault on Gaza, there two assaults on Jews here in New York,
The more Moslems in this country the more attacks there will be on Jews. This is the history of Jewish communities in western Europe it will be our history in the US if were not careful about whose allowed to come to the US.
* Frishman is a rabbi? She doesn’t speak a word of Hebrew. When the Women of the Wall featured her on video with an Israeli police officer telling her she could not wear a Tallit she called Anat Hoffman for an urgent translation. What a joke. Might as well be at the circus.
* At the bottom, Mr.Guttman is referred to as the Forward’s Chief of the Washington Bureau. The Forward doesn’t have a Washington Bureau! Who else works there? Let Mr. Guttmann house these people in his home and stop ramming this down our throats. They have made terrible problems rioting throughout Europe. The is nonsense anyway. The purpose of these articles is to bring these Jew haters here. It would be a catastrophe.
