The Kaumheimers were about to make it out of Italy alive. It was 1939, and the family of six had already left their German hometown of Stuttgart three years earlier when conditions for Jews worsened there. Now Julius and Selma were seeking to escape to the United States with their children Hans, Fritz, Ruth and Margaret.
“My mother didn’t want to leave,” Margaret Kaplan recalled in a 1990 interview with the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project. “But my father convinced her.”
So leave they did, but not without a price. Italy’s Hitler-aligned fascist government would let them out only in exchange for their collection of roughly 69 porcelain figurines from 18th-century Europe. They had almost made it with their treasures, but the movers who came to pack up their possessions tipped off the Italian authorities.
Why is HIAS seeking to make America s border crisis even worse?
April 30, 2021
(JNS) Over the weekend, President Joe Biden finally conceded that what was happening at America’s southern border is a “crisis,” a word that his administration had consistently refused to use when referring to the situation there which appears to be worsening every day. By Monday, White House flacks were trying to walk back the admission as just another Biden gaffe to be ignored or reinterpreted, but no one is being fooled.
Except that is, blind partisans or donors to HIAS the agency that once played an essential role in aiding Jewish immigrants but now raises millions from Jew.
The annual refugee resettlement kerfuffle is underway.
As usual, on one side are the immigration expansionists: President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, congressional Democrats and predictable GOP defectors, immigration lawyers who see dollar signs in their futures, resettlement agencies who also profit disproportionately, and the tirelessly active pro-immigration lobby.
On the other side are American voters, who want to see an admission cap thatâs consistent with the nationâs ability to absorb refugees, the current economy and, in 2021, the possible consequences from a still-threatening COVID-19 that refugees might carry. Americans also want to maintain the countryâs well-deserved image as a compassionate, caring nation.
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Activists hold a banner during a pro-refugee demonstration organized by HIAS outside the US Capitol, September 14, 2017. (Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images/ via JTA/ SUE)
JTA Three weeks after taking office, US President Joe Biden announced that he would quadruple the number of refugees allowed into the United States.
For HIAS, it seemed like an answered prayer, as the Jewish refugee aid agency had endured a rough four years under Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump.
HIAS, which once focused on resettling refugees, had confronted the first president since World War II who demonized refugees and then temporarily banned them from the United States. The gunman who killed 11 Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue condemned HIAS by name shortly before the massacre.