2018 Congregants RH Day 2

2018 Second Day of Rosh Hashanah

We have a tradition at Agudas Achim that congregants offer words of wisdom on the second day of Rosh Hashanah in place of a the rabbi's sermon. Rabbi Leora asked three of the participants in her adult learning class on argument for the sake of heaven to reflect on how, in an increasingly polarized word, we can take pride in our unique experiences with a deep sense of what binds us all together. Here are teachings from three of our congregants.

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During the summer of 1985, when I was 12 and a half, I spent six weeks at a summer camp in Israel. About 2/3 of the camp came from the U.S. and Canada and about 1/3 from Israel. I have a lot of memories from this experience, but I’d like to share one today that I immediately thought of when Rabbi Leora sent me her prompting questions.

I remember being in a big room, and around the room there were signs that said, “American”, “Israeli”, “Jewish”, “American-Jew”, “Jewish-American”, etc. We were told to go stand under the sign which we most strongly identified. I remember struggling with this quite a bit. What am I? Who am I? This is a question that most middle-schoolers ponder, but more on a subconscious level, as they are trying to figure out how they fit into this world. Here, I was thrust into thinking about it openly and publicly.
I quickly decided that I could not say just “Jewish.” In my mind, that was reserved for the Orthodox Jews walking through the streets of Crown Heights, Brooklyn or davening along the Western Wall.

Am I just “American?” Well, no. That didn’t seem to fit too well either. American, to me at the time, was Laura Ingalls Wilder, country music, and Santa Claus. That wasn’t me either. So, then it was “Jewish-American” versus “American-Jew.” I seem to recall spending an awfully long time pondering this (although, I bet it was really only a minute or two).

I don’t fully remember my thought process, nor can I remember what I wound up choosing. Likely, I chose what many of the other kids chose, despite all my 12-year-old private deliberations. But now that it is 33 years later, I find myself exploring this idea again. And I’ve realized, that in some ways, I feel like all these labels can be appropriate, while in other ways, I feel distant from each label.

In terms of being labeled just “Jewish,” I no longer feel like that is the privilege of the most Orthodox of Jews. But I do struggle with this label. I have spent many years thinking that I did not have a complete Jewish education, that there are major gaps in my Jewish knowledge, and that more observant Jews are much more “Jewish” than I am. But I’m beginning to learn what Jewish means for me. Family traditions, not working on Saturdays, attending services when I can, songs and books, and Jewish reconstructionist values. While I’m sure some may not think my beliefs and practices are truly Jewish, I certainly feel they are. Yet, I would not define myself only as “Jewish.”

“American” is a label that I never really struggled with until recently. I was always proud and patriotic. Growing up towards the end of the cold war, I couldn’t have imagined it any other way. The peak for me was when I was a junior in college and was fortunate enough to spend a semester interning on Capitol Hill for the House Ways and Means Committee. It was exciting to see how a bill really becomes a law and meeting many hardworking career public servants who are behind the scenes making our democracy work. It was the fall of 1992; the year Bill Clinton was elected into office. And I was immersed in it, the good and the bad. It was at that time that I learned about the kind of research that helps inform policies and programs that support low income and underserved populations, and I knew that this would be a way that I could contribute to making our country better. To this day, I continue to get excited on my business trips to DC when landing at Reagan National airport, with the amazing view of the Lincoln Memorial and the National Mall. But in recent years being a “proud American”, to some, requires a certain political belief. I have to admit that on more than one occasion over the past couple of years, I felt like yelling in frustration to my husband, let’s pack our bags and move to Canada! But I never will. Because underneath it all, I am an American, and I know I have responsibilities as an American that I take very seriously. And part of that responsibility is engaging with people who I don’t necessarily agree with and learning different perspectives. And that leads right into the importance of my identity as a Jewish-American. I’m certain that many of my values as a Jewish person bleed into my beliefs as an American. I come from a certain perspective, and the strength of our country, if we’d let it be a strength, is that we do have so many different perspectives that we can learn and grow from.

So, I’m Jewish, I’m American, and I’m a Jewish-American. But what about being an American Jew? Where does that lead me? This one certainly is less fleshed out for me, but no less important to examine. At the beginning of the summer, I had some letters translated from Yiddish to English. These letters were from the 1950s and 1960s and were between my Grandpa Irving and his brother who immigrated to Mexico. I had always known that there was an uncle in Mexico but knew nothing about him. My grandfather came from Poland. He was an orphan and had four other siblings. They were all separated in Poland and raised in different families. When they grew to adulthood in the late 1910s/early ‘20s, their Aunt, who had moved to the U.S., sent them all money to get out of Europe. Two went to Palestine, two went to Mexico (one of which migrated from Mexico to California), and one (my grandfather) came in through Canada and made his way into the U.S. The siblings came from the same place, but experienced such different adult lives. Two lived through the birth of the country of Israel, my Mexican great-uncle struggled with a furniture business in what I believe was a strong Jewish community, my Californian great uncle died too soon, leaving a young daughter behind, and then my grandpa. A deli man. Always struggling to make ends meet, but always supporting his family as best he could, and one of the biggest cheerleaders for the state of Israel. All were immigrants, all lived Jewish lives, but their lived experiences varied in such different ways.

So now I live my life as an American Jew in 2018. As a Jewish-American. In the end, I do feel like my Americanness and Jewishness are intertwined. No need to choose a corner of a room.

Immigration is a contentious, emotionally charged issue in our country right now.
For me immigration is a deeply personal issue. My parents were immigrants. I grew up in an immigrant community. I’ve heard firsthand stories of leaving your homeland behind.

My family is from St Michael, the largest island of the Azores, that group of 9 islands in the middle of the Atlantic. The Azores were stumbled upon by Portuguese sailors in the early 1400s, who then claimed them for Portugal. The islands were uninhabited when they were discovered. They quickly became settled by people from the southern part of Portugal, later settlers came from other parts of Europe.

Modern day development of the islands was very slow. Geographically isolated, subjected to frequent volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, neglected by the Portuguese government, the islands seemed to be frozen in time. There were little to no economic opportunities and most Azoreans were poor and uneducated. For many the only route to a better life was to get off the islands.

I grew up hearing stories about my family’s attempts to leave. I heard about my father’s grandfather who left in the late 1800s for California to work in the mines. Within a month of his arrival he was killed in a mining accident. I heard about how the first letter the family received from America was the one notifying them of his death. He left behind 5 children, the youngest, my father’s mother, was 2 years old.
I heard about my mother’s grandparents leaving for Hawaii to work in the sugar plantations, also in the late 1800s. I heard about how my grandmother was “almost” born in Hawaii – I’m not exactly sure what that meant - and I missed the details about why they went back.

My father’s father left in the early 1900s and settled in New Bedford; my grandmother and their daughter stayed behind. It was several years before they were able to join him. My grandparents went on to have 2 sons while here in the States, one of them was my father. But with the Depression looming, times were tough. And my grandmother, pregnant with her 4th child and with the other kids in tow, made the trans-Atlantic journey back to St. Michael, leaving my grandfather in New Bedford. They never lived together again. My father, although American born, grew up on the island.

There were few economic opportunities in the Azores and no jobs for women. A woman without a husband had to rely on the men in her family for survival. So, my father and his brother, instead of going to school, worked in the fields alongside their uncles to help my grandmother provide for the family. I suspect my father started dreaming of leaving the island while he worked in those fields.

My mother was one of 11 kids, living in a one-bedroom house. My grandfather worked as a field hand barely able to feed everyone under his roof. But despite being poor my mother always spoke fondly of her childhood. I remember her saying when she talked about her growing up, “We were poor, but we were happy.” I don’t think she ever dreamed of leaving. But she was a traditional woman who believed in being a dutiful wife, so when she agreed to marry my father she also agreed to immigrate. My father left first and went to New Bedford where his father was still living; my mother followed later with my 13-month-old sister. The year was 1950. I came along 6 years later, my younger sister arrived 5 years after that.
As a child I heard about the struggles my parents faced growing up. I knew my life was very different from the one they had lived as children, and it was always clear to me how different my childhood would have been if they hadn’t made the sacrifice to immigrate. They had left behind family and friends to live in a place where they didn’t speak the language and where they had to work hard at physically demanding jobs so that we could have a better life.
My mother would sometimes say she wanted my sisters and me to work at jobs where our hands wouldn’t get dirty. She wanted me to be a bank teller. Counting out other people’s money must have seemed like a dream job to her, compared to the work she did as a stitcher in a coat factory. Her job was to sew the back seam of women’s coats, and that’s all she did for 8 hours a day. But I know she was grateful for the work. My mother would sometimes say that the best thing about America was that women could work and help their husbands provide.

My father’s dream for us was that we graduate high school. It was common back then for Portuguese kids to leave school at 16 - as soon as they legally could - to get a factory job and contribute to the family’s finances. But my father recognized that kids deserved to be educated. I’m lucky; I surpassed both my mother and my father’s dream for me; I went to college, got a graduate degree and have a professional career that allows me to keep my hands clean.

Why do people immigrate? Why do some people choose to leave their homes, abandon family and friends, leave everything they know to start over in an unfamiliar place? The reasons are varied. Some people are searching for security, some are looking for better living conditions, some are trying to escape poverty. Others are looking for work or educational opportunities. Some want to reunite with loved ones who have left before them. Regardless of the specific details, immigrating always requires hope and the belief that your life can be more than what you’ve been handed, the belief that you can have control over your own life.

As the debate rages on, my wish is that every conversation, every discussion about immigration is grounded in the fact that everyone who is brave enough to leave their homeland behind is simply looking for a better life. Every immigrant wants what we all want: to feel safe, to be able to provide for ourselves and our families, to have the chance to create a life worth living.

I began college as a history major. I took a year-long course in American ideas and attitudes, which required 2 major papers. I chose for my fall paper 19th century American attitudes toward immigration, and for the spring paper the early 20th century American eugenics movement. At the time, I was drawn to these topics but didn’t know why. At some point in retrospect, it dawned on me that my interests had something to do with everyone in my family born before me having been an immigrant, and falling somewhere on a spectrum with respectable minority status at the benign end and murder in the name of racial purity at the other end.

My mother was born in a small village in southern Ukraine, where her mother was the village pharmacist and her father traveled around to buy the ingredients for her compounds. They left in 1926 for Tel Aviv because in the chaos of the Russian civil war of the twenties, my great uncle was randomly shot and killed, and my mother’s baby brother was killed on a train by a Russian soldier. They later left Tel Aviv for Albany NY, where my mother and uncle were raised. She became a social worker and he a journalist.

My grandmother’s sister emigrated to Chile, one brother emigrated to Virginia, the other brother’s family walked across the border as illegal immigrants to Romania where they settled. He became an accountant. I’ve gotten to know that brother’s daughter, Blumette, who became a chemical engineer and emigrated to Canada.

My father was born in Brody, Galicia, for centuries a center of Jewish life. He went to medical school in Prague, as Polish medical schools at the time were not accepting Jews. He graduated in 1938 and was accepted into a program for refugee doctors at the Beth Israel in Boston, and stayed to open up a practice in Leominster. His parents, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews were killed.

Fast forward to 1980 when I emigrated from the US – to Canada where I did a residency and my status was called “landed immigrant”. Then Brien and I married, and 15 years later came to the US, I as a citizen, Brien as a resident alien, and our daughters Suzie and Arie as immigrants with dual citizenship. And now Arie appears to have emigrated to France.

Maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised by Arie doing that.

Several times a year I meet with a group of adult children of Holocaust survivors, just to talk. It’s not formal therapy but it’s very therapeutic because it is only in that group that each of us can talk about the traumas our family members have experienced without other people becoming very sad and uncomfortable and clamming up. As Rabbi Meitner, herself the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, once said, “Mentioning the Holocaust takes all the air out of a room” – but that’s not true in the room where our group meets. We explore how the Holocaust and immigration have affected us and possibly our children. We are cracked, but we help each other let the light in. Through this group, I’ve learned that children of survivors are overrepresented in service professions, and I finally understood that that has a lot to do with why I became a doctor.

When I read over my notes for this talk, it looks like my family’s history is characterized by continuous and widespread instability, but I don’t feel it consciously as such. The family history has shaped me, though, to feel like an outsider much of the time, especially growing up among Leominster’s enormous Irish, Italian, and French-Canadian families. It has also shaped me to be analytical, probably too serious, service-oriented if not obsessed, but also to be extremely grateful to be alive.
My personal story of psychological nuance is a very small story in the context of the refugee crisis of today.

Currently, over a million refugees are trying to settle in places that are safer than their homelands, at tremendous physical and psychological risk to themselves. Judaism can be very inward-looking, but there is also a strong universalist strain in our tradition.

It can be difficult to welcome the stranger, but please try to welcome the stranger by donating what you can to the AHOPE bin, coming to hear Dr. Akbar talk about AHOPE at Sukkot services, participating in HIAS’ National Refugee Shabbat here October 19-20 including coming to the film “The Human Flow” by Ai Wei-Wei the evening of the 20th, and keeping an eye on our bulletin for other ways to help.
Thank you.