Speech #880208677

Mr. President. 80 years ago. in 1884. when thousands of destitute Jews were fleeing from the terrible pogroms of Czarist Russia. a group of publicspirited citizens in the Jewish community of New York organized the Hebrew Sheltering House Association. In its first decade. almost 200.000 Jews arrived in this country. and the association played a vital part not only in resettling Jewish refugees here. but also in providing temporary shelter and helping secure employment. From these beginnings the successor Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society was established in 1902. Following the merger of HIAS in 1954 with the National Refugee Service and the United Service for New Americans. todays organization. the United HIAS Service. continues to pursue on a much larger scale the same humanitarian purposes for which the Hebrew Sheltering House was founded 80 years ago. During the past 80 years. world Jewry has suffered from repeated. unspeakable horrors. In 1903. a year after the founding of HIAS. the Czarist pogrom in Kishinev shocked an entire world and touched off a mighty wave of Jewish expatriation from Russia. in 6 years. from 1904 to 1910. 683.000 Jews arrived in the United States. Again. World War I threatened the virtual extinction of hundreds of thousands of European Jews. and in the wake of the main military action came 2 more years of Russian pogroms as well as the brief RussianPolish War. which also caught Jews in the middle. During the 1920s. the enactment of the Immigration Act of 1924. which set the pattern of the national quota origins system that still blights our statute books today. left thousands of wouldbe immigrant Jews stranded in European ports. The 1930s and 1940s brought the Nazi holocaust. the annihilation of 6 million European Jews. the flight of hundreds of thousands from Nazi tyranny. and the displacement of 200.000 more from their homelands as of the end of World War II. In the 1950s a series of great emergenciesthe Suez crisis. the Hungarian up-: rising. the Algerian war for independence. the Castro takeover in Cuba. and continued antiSemitic repression behind the Iron Curtaineach of these has given rise to mass emigrations of Jews. many or most of them shorn of their property. the human victims of a world seething with revolution and strife not of their making. These 80 years of suffering and hardship for millions of Jews have posed unbelievable challenges to the organiza-. tional and financial abilities of United HIAS Service. which is. of course. one of only many great private organizations working in the arena of immigrant aid and resettlement. But United HIAS Service has met these challenges. and has met them brilliantly. It has resettled political and religious refugees in countries around the world. It has directly aided the hungry and the destitute among them. It has furnished new arrivals in America with legal. assistance in visa. deportation. and naturalization matters. It has fully cooperated with U.S. and international agencies active in the field of migration and refugee aid. As United HIAS Serv-* ice characterizes its work. it has truly been a bridge to freedom. The work of United HIAS Service continues. No one should underestimate the huge task of refugee resettlement that remains unfinished. Of 10.000 Jews in Cuba when Castro came to power. 7.500 have since fled. many receiving resettlement aid from United HIAS. Following Algerian independence. 130.000 Algerian Jews fled to France. again.