By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
Not all heroes are exciting. Not everyone can be a firefighter rushing into a collapsing tower. For some, just going to work and doing their job can be a form of heroism, not because of the threats or roadblocks thrown up before them, but simply because what they accomplish makes so much difference in the lives of the people that they touch.
The year 2001 marked the 120th anniversary of that kind of heroism by the staff and volunteers of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, known universally by their acronym, “HIAS.” Having been around Europe and the Middle East for a dozen decades, HIAS has helped an estimated 4.5 million émigrés find their way to new homes in countries promising them a new start and freedom from political and religious oppression.
Given those numbers, it is a statistical probability that every family reading this story has a part to play in it, that at least some of its members have been on the receiving end of help from HIAS. But, given the often low-key approach of the organization and the frequently mundane shape of that aid, it is just as possible that no one has had cause to recall it.
Klaus Stern is one Seattle resident who does recall the part HIAS played in his own life. Stern is a Holocaust survivor who worked in the Allied Forces’ displaced persons camps following the end of the Second World War.
“HIAS was a big help for people who didn’t have anybody at the time,” Stern said. “The quota was for 100,000 survivors to the United States. We were liberated in the Russian zone, then we came over to the American zone and we applied for our papers at Nuremberg, I think. The American committee worked with us — the non-Jewish American committee gave us the opportunity to get together with HIAS,” he said. “I don’t know how we found out about them: It was a long time ago. I’d say they more or less came to us,” Stern said. In all probability, he added, the Jewish Federation office in Nuremberg must have put them in touch.
“I leapt at a chance to come over here. My parents were killed in the camp; my wife’s family was killed in a camp,” Stern said, “so we didn’t have anybody to look for.
“We didn’t have any money to help to come by boat, to pay for the passage and to pay for this and that, to pay for the hotel. We couldn’t pay anything to get over here,” he said. “We came out of the camp, we had no money.”
Stern knew that he had an uncle, a doctor named Herman Nossen, his mother’s brother, who had managed to escape the Nazi state in 1937. By the war’s end in 1945, they had lost contact. HIAS, he said, helped them to fill out the paperwork to get their travel documents and to locate a relative who could serve as a sponsor.
“I didn’t even know my uncle and three other Jewish doctors took care of the new immigrants. They volunteered through the Jewish Family Service,” Stern recalled.
For Seattleite Esther Loewy, HIAS was the essential link that allowed her to gain refugee visas for herself and her father to go to England in the spring of 1939, “after I’d been to every bloody office in Berlin, trying to get a visa to America.”
To get into the United States, they had to qualify under the Polish quota of “two thousand-some people.” Although the city she was born in, Poznan, had been traded back and forth between Poland and Germany during the years between the two major wars and had been under German control when she was born, she fell under Polish immigration quotas when she was applying. Immigration officials they spoke to at the time said they would be lucky to get a visa to leave within 10 years’ time, Loewy said she knew they did not have to wait.
HIAS’s role was to provide the application forms at their Berlin office, which forwarded the applications to the appropriate offices both in the U.K. and the U.S. Once she was resettled in Britain, Loewy said she followed standard procedures to emigrate across the Atlantic to Seattle in 1946, since several family members were already well established in the States. “My father’s youngest brother was here and I promised that if I ever got to the States, I would visit Uncle Joe,” she said.
HIAS dates its beginnings to the founding of the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society, which was formed in 1881 by the Russian Emigrant Relief Committee to help provide meals, counseling and job services to the more than 100,000 Jews who came to New York from Russia and Eastern Europe in 1881—82. The organization was formally established under its current name nearly 20 years later. In the years before World War I, during the greatest waves of Jewish immigration, HIAS became an important player in the process for tens of thousands of refugees from France, the Ottoman Empire and other parts of Europe, by pledging support for the new arrivals. The U.S. Committee for Refugees, which keeps an up-to-date listing of immigrant and refugee organizations worldwide, calls HIAS “the International migration arm of the organized American Jewish community.” In the 1990s alone, USCR reports, HIAS has helped a quarter of a million Jews from the countries of the former Soviet Union to resettle in the United States.
Jeanette Lozovsky, director of refugee services at Seattle’s Jewish Family Service, said the group continues to play an essential if often behind-the scenes role.
“We always resettle people who come through HIAS only. They can be Jews from the former Soviet Union, it can be Iranian Bahais, it can be refugees from Bosnia or Kosava, but we do not resettle any refugee or client if they are not [referred] from HIAS,” Lozovsky said. As the Jewish Family Service resettlement coordinator since October 1988, Lozovsky said she remembers when they offered help to anyone who managed to leave the Soviet Union (as it was constituted at the time.) After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Lozovsky said, the situation changed, because most émigrés no longer had to leave their home country before applying for a visa.
According to Lozovsky,“HIAS is an organization that lets us know who is coming.” Sponsoring U.S. relatives fill out the forms. Information is sent from the foreign embassy to the Washington, D.C., processing center to HIAS’s New York office, which in turn forwards that on to the appropriate local Jewish Family Service. Because of the process, HIAS often remains invisible to the families involved.