On Sunday, September 6, in the sunny yard of a London school, I met Erica, a weary middle-aged woman from Eritrea whom I was trying to help. Over a Styrofoam cup of milky tea, she described her life—an unrelenting limbo of food vouchers, hand-outs and the unpredictable whim of local neighborhood councils. An asylum seeker,…
Citing Switzerland’s refusal to take in greater numbers of Jews during the Holocaust, the president of its Federation of Jewish Communities urged his government to take in migrants from the Middle East. Federation president Herbert Winter’s plea, titled “Refugees: No, the Boat is not Full,” was published Tuesday in the Les Temps daily. While thousands…
He said he was from Damascus. Camped out two flights below, speaking a mix of French and Arabic, he wasn’t hard to understand. I caught a glimpse of him in late August, on my way to the laundromat. Sitting on top of a pile of blankets, covered by a sleeping bag, the immigrant from Syria…
A leading U.S. Congressional opponent to allowing Syrian refugees into the United States said that Middle Eastern nations have “more room” to take in the huge wave of people fleeing their war-torn homeland. The United States faces significant security risks by agreeing to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees, which the Obama administration said it would do…
French Jewish groups, including Western Europe’s largest charity for Jews, signed a declaration of principles for coordinated efforts to provide relief for Syrian refugees. The declaration, initiated by French Chief Rabbi Haim Korsia and published Thursday, states each of the six co-signatory groups will “act to accompany the refugees, each according to its competences and…
I have watched the unfolding refugee crisis with horror. Who could not be moved by the sight of families risking their children’s lives in rickety boats and on rafts designed for leisure and not for escape routes on rough waters? The picture of little Aylan Kurdi in blue shorts and red shirt dead on the…
Jewish leaders criticized Czech police for marking numbers on the arms of more than 200 refugees, saying that it recalled the Holocaust. News reports that “dozens of refugees were literally branded as if they were cattle at the slaughterhouse, inevitably recalling the darkest period of contemporary history, are just the latest in a series of…
“There’s always this joke that half of Tel Aviv is actually here,” Liad Hussein Kantorowicz told me when I interviewed her in her Berlin apartment. The numbers back her up: According to the latest estimates, 15,000 to 20,000 people have left Israel in recent years to forge a new life in Berlin. Most of these…
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