Refugee crisis A Passover lesson

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/04/2017 (3487 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

AT the start of Passover, which begins this year on Monday evening, Jewish people customarily sit down at their seder tables to discuss themes of slavery and liberation, while celebrating the Hebrew exodus from Egypt circa 1446 BC.

In 2017, however, it would seem both out of touch and indifferent to speak about that event without also talking about current events and recognizing the millions worldwide who are enslaved, homeless and seeking refuge.

The Jewish people, who share a collective genetic memory of persecution and exile stretching from biblical times to the 20th century, have a particular obligation to recognize the suffering of others. The Torah instructs its followers 36 different times to help the stranger living among them, simply because, as Jews, they know what it is like to feel unwanted and unwelcome.

The Passover Haggadah, which is the holiday’s instructional text for the festive seder meal, reinforces this idea with the directive that every Jew should “see himself or herself as though he or she personally came forth from Egypt.”

“Passover is an important time in the Jewish calendar and plays a strong role in Jewish culture and psyche,” says Morgan Buras Finlay, a spokeswoman for Right Now: Advocates for Asylum Seekers in Israel, a human rights organization.

“At Passover, we identify strongly with being strangers in a strange land and our story of exodus, journey and refuge.”

That self-identification, in turn, is meant to generate greater empathy for the pain and suffering of other strangers in strange lands.

In recent years, that pain and suffering has been indelibly etched onto the faces of myriad people around the world, including those who risk their lives on leaky boats to cross the Mediterranean and those who risk their lives on desolate snow-covered fields to cross into Manitoba.

Many Jewish community organizations, congregations and individuals, including here in Winnipeg, have taken up the cause of refugees and have done notable work to help support, sponsor and resettle them, whether they are from Syria, Iraq or Sudan. In Israel, where the Hebrew people were delivered upon their exodus from slavery, grassroots organizations are even helping Syrian refugees, although their countries are avowed enemies.

Other grassroots agencies, such as Buras Finlay’s Right Now, have focused their attention on raising awareness about and showing support to thousands of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers in Israel. After fleeing persecution in their homelands, these asylum seekers have largely been disparaged, ignored and, in some cases, deported by the Israeli government.

Every spring, Right Now connects the refugee crisis to the Passover holiday by sponsoring two refugee seders, one in Tel Aviv where the majority of the African asylum seekers live, and the other in Holot, where many of the African asylum seekers are detained.

This year, the organization also is partnering with the century-old international resettlement agency HIAS in order to encourage Diaspora Jewish communities to organize their own Refugee Seders as a means of drawing attention to the crisis.

HIAS’s motto — Welcome the Stranger. Protect the Refugee — perfectly describes what the organization has been doing for decades and what it believes everyone, Jew and non-Jew alike, should be doing, not just on Passover, but throughout the year.

swchisvin@gmail.com

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