Area women launch a Jewish response to immigration crisis | Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle

Area women launch a Jewish response to immigration crisis

It just so happens that not long after reading a Torah portion about arei miklat, the biblical cities of refuge, Harriet Schachter McKinney met with a few Jewish community members to talk about immigrations-related issues.

McKinney, who is executive director of MAJC (Milwaukee Area Jewish Committee); her daughter Shahanna McKinney-Baldon, a teacher and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee graduate student; UWM Prof. Rachel Ida Buff and retired UWM administrator Rose Daitsman had gathered to continue a discussion about how to foster a local Jewish response to the current crisis of deportation and detention of immigrants in the U.S..

The opportunity provided by the Torah portion to focus on Jewish beliefs about protecting the vulnerable and the stranger led McKinney to contemplate that the work of the New Sanctuary Movement, locally and nationally, and even the word sanctuary itself, are strongly associated with Christianity. 

The New Sanctuary Movement, a project of Voces de la Frontera (Spanish for “Voices from the Border”), is the most active organization working in Milwaukee on social justice aspects of immigration and each of the Jewish women in McKinney’s group had connected with it in one way or another.

Voces had approached McKinney and the others with a request to help build involvement in immigration issues in the Jewish community and they were enthusiastic about the challenge.

Conscious that such an initiative would need “language with which we [Jews] can identify,” McKinney proposed the name Miklat and with that the new Jewish organization MIKLAT! A Jewish Response to Displacement was born.

The founders have recently formed a Facebook group for MIKLAT! and its membership now exceeds 30. This week MIKLAT! co-sponsored a holiday party at a South Side restaurant with the New Sanctuary Movement to help build interest and membership.

McKinney said her group is also “in the process of reaching out and talking to rabbis” and said MIKLAT! welcomes the concern and support of other Jews both as part of groups and as individuals.

Some likely efforts of the new organization include opening up houses of worship to people as safe houses, drawing attention and educating the community about the issues and fundraising for activities such as helping families and starting a Web site.

“We would like to figure out some easier ways for people to get involved and actually do things that are going to make a difference,” McKinney-Baldon said.

 
All connected

The problems of immigrants in the U.S. have increased and decreased continuously throughout the life of the nation and they have grown in recent years.

“At least since Sept. 11, the treatment of undocumented [immigrants in the U.S.] has become much more punitive,” explained McKinney. This is a result of “zeal to protect the country from terrorism and to deflect criticism for lack of government monitoring of visas, as the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attack were all here legally, initially, and many had overstayed their visas,” she said.

Buff explained that these harsher immigration policies very often result in disruptive and painful experiences for the undocumented immigrants.

Family members are separated from one another and “terror is inflicted on both those detained and those who are not detained, who are home. It’s very hard for people trying to figure out what happened to their relatives to locate them, because people are detained sometimes in local facilities, some are sent to detention centers in other states and just deported to Mexico or Guatemala or El Salvador.”

Since the May 12 Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) raid on Agriprocessors, Inc., America’s largest kosher meat processing plant in Postville, Iowa, the American Jewish community has become more aware of the effects of our nation’s current treatment of would-be immigrants. That raid, the largest in U.S. history, resulted in the detention of 390 immigrant workers.

McKinney noted that many people in the Jewish community went to Postville to stand in solidarity with the workers there. But “they left and the work of supporting families is once again in the churches.”

American Jews, who are mostly secure in their status as citizens, may wonder how much relevance this issue has for the Jewish community, McKinney said.

Her answer to that is, “We know as a people what it was like to be denied entrance to this country and what it meant for [Jews] who perished because there were very few places that opened their doors.”

There are a number of terrible situations going on in the world now that people are desperate to escape and, McKinney said, “It’s just not OK to stand idly by the blood of your brother, whether it’s a Jewish brother or not.” But she added, “There are actually Jews who are affected by this. MAJC is working with an individual who falls into this category,” she said, explaining that she could not give more details for the protection of the person in question.

“It’s relevant, whether our ox is being gored or not, frankly.” And the truth is though we may not be directly threatened today, tomorrow we might be, she said.

“We sometimes forget how we are all connected. We just have to look at Mumbai to remember how we are all connected,” McKinney said.

 
Jewish immigrants

Daitsman worked extensively at UWM to help minority students gain higher education in engineering, science and technology. She said one reason she is passionate about immigration is that her own parents were immigrants who weren’t able to get into this country under the quotas of the time.

They had to spend a year in Canada first, she said.

Jews need to work with others who have similar problems, she said. “It’s important for Jewish people not to be too self-contained, but to reach out to the broader community.”

McKinney-Baldon, a teacher on sabbatical from the Milwaukee Public School system to earn a graduate degree in educational administration, agreed.

“Working for immigrant rights is really the Jewish thing to do. We have textual bases to look to in terms of how this fits into our worldview as Jews and that’s one reason why I’m really excited to be doing this work as a Jewish woman,” she said.

Buff, who has been going to the New Solidarity’s vigil on the first Thursday of every month, where she is usually the only Jewish person there, has been longing for more Jewish involvement in this important cause, she said.

Sitting in a church for the September vigil Buff was contemplating the Days of Awe and thinking how nice it would be to hold such a vigil in a synagogue.

The vigils are sometimes held in churches because “usually the people who are facing deportation are too scared to appear publicly.”

That is a condition that Jews can relate to “because Jews have so often been displaced and deported and detained,” Buff said.

“And I think there’s great sympathy among the Jewish people to the situation of the stranger, the immigrant.”