The Charlotte Jewish News - December 2021 - Page 15
Welcoming the Stranger: A Call to Assist with Local Afghan Resettlement By Amy Lefkof Afghan evacuation and resettlement were the focus of the fourth Annual Welcoming the Stranger to the Table Zoom program organized by the Jewish Community Refugee Initiative (JCRI). The Nov. 7 program was a balance of education, inspiring personal stories, and specific action items (both advocacy and direct action). The program, attended by more than 80 people and moderated by Moira Quinn, featured representatives from several local agencies that serve or advocate on behalf of refugees, HIAS (the oldest resettlement agency in the world and one of nine national resettlement agencies in the United States), Temple Beth El’s Rabbi Asher Knight, and a young Afghan special immigrant visa (SIV) holder who was resettled in Charlotte in 2018. With a $15,000 dollar-for-dollar match from Gary and Stephanie Starr, Clay and Deidre Grubb, and an anonymous donor, JCRI was able to raise over $30,000 for
the Afghan Emergency Fund of Carolina Refugee Resettlement Agency (CRRA). Knight began the evening by reminding attendees that although Emma Lazarus’s words are inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”), our nation has not always lived up to its values. In a 1939 Gallop poll, 61% of Americans opposed taking in 10,000 refugee children, most of them German Jews. In the same year, the S.S. St. Louis sailed near the coast of Miami but was not allowed to disembark its more than 900 passengers — nearly all of them Jewish refugees. The ship returned to Europe, where many of them died in the Holocaust. Knight reasoned that because we as Jews know what it’s like to be demonized, to be turned away, we have the responsibility to “light a path of hope” for other refugees and “write the next chapter of history with both our feet and our voices.”
Leon Golynsky, a member of the JCRI Steering Committee, whose family was resettled by HIAS from Belarus to Ohio in 1979, explains JCRI's Afghan Evacuation and Resettlement zoom program during the JCC’s Chesed (kindness) Fair. Representatives from both HIAS and its local affiliate CRRA spoke at the Zoom program.
After putting the Afghan crisis into the much larger context of a dire global refugee crisis (there are presently 85 million people worldwide displaced by
either conflict or persecution), Rebecca Kirzner, senior director of grassroots campaigns, HIAS, explained the difference between SIV holders (a special resettle-
ment category for Iraqi or Afghan nationals who worked with U.S. Armed Forces or U.S. governmental agencies) and those Afghans recently evacuated under chaotic circumstances via humanitarian parole (a temporary status that does not provide a path to permanent residency). Kirzner encouraged attendees to contact their members of Congress to support the passage of an Afghan Adjustment Act that would provide a roadmap to permanent status for Afghans on humanitarian parole after one year. This would put Afghan parolees on the same legal footing they would have enjoyed if they had been admitted through the U.S. refugee resettlement program. As Sharon Dove, who heads up the Immigrant Justice Program at Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy, explained, “Humanitarian parole is merely a short-term temporary status. When their status expires, Afghan parolees will fall out of status and ultimately become removable in immigration court unless they (Continued on page 22)
